Core concepts

Regulatory Snapshot is one engine with two front doors. The web app, where compliance and research teams configure scans and read dashboards, and the developer API, where engineers drive the same engine programmatically, both speak the same vocabulary — and rest on the same handful of ideas. Three pages of concepts is enough to make the rest of the docs click.

This section is short on purpose. Most readers will spend ten minutes here and never come back. The goal is to install a working mental model so terms like “snapshot”, “scan”, “items”, and “changes” mean the same thing to everyone on your team, whether they are running the app or calling the API.

Read this if you are evaluating Regulatory Snapshot, onboarding a new colleague, or trying to reconcile what you saw on the dashboard with what came back from a GET /v1/snapshots/{id} call. Skip it if you already know how the parts fit together and head straight to Using Snapshot or the API reference.

In this section

• What is a snapshot? — the data model both audiences share. Items, trends, the executive summary and narrative, and (on recurring scans) a record of what changed.
• Scans and snapshots — the lifecycle. How a scan request becomes a snapshot you can read on the dashboard or fetch from the API.
• Changes between scans — what Regulatory Snapshot means by “new”, “updated”, “unchanged”, and “removed” when you re-run the same configuration.

See also

• Using Snapshot — the product walk-through for non-technical users.
• API overview — the developer reference.
• Glossary — A→Z definitions for every term used across the docs.