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A project is a collection of files used for producing one or more programs. Files that belong to a project are typically stored in a hierarchy of directories; the top-level directory of the hierarchy is known as the project root.
Whether a given directory is a root of some project is determined by the project-specific infrastructure, known as project back-end. Emacs currently supports two such back-ends: VC (see Version Control), whereby a VCS repository is considered a project; and EDE (see Emacs Development Environment). This is expected to be extended in the future to support additional types of projects.
Which files do or don’t belong to a project is also determined by the project back-end. For example, the VC back-end doesn’t consider “ignored” files (see Ignore Version Control Files) to be part of the project.