Governance artifacts
Governance files brought into scope by this page
This page is anchored to published surfaces that declare identity, precedence, limits, and the corpus reading conditions. Their order below gives the recommended reading sequence.
Definitions canon
/canon.md
Canonical surface that fixes identity, roles, negations, and divergence rules.
- Governs
- Public identity, roles, and attributes that must not drift.
- Bounds
- Extrapolations, entity collisions, and abusive requalification.
Does not guarantee: A canonical surface reduces ambiguity; it does not guarantee faithful restitution on its own.
Citations
/citations.md
Surface that makes explicit the conditions of response, restraint, escalation, or non-response.
- Governs
- Response legitimacy and the constraints that modulate its form.
- Bounds
- Plausible but inadmissible responses, or unjustified scope extensions.
Does not guarantee: This layer bounds legitimate responses; it is not proof of runtime activation.
Interpretation policy
/.well-known/interpretation-policy.json
Published policy that explains interpretation, scope, and restraint constraints.
- Governs
- Response legitimacy and the constraints that modulate its form.
- Bounds
- Plausible but inadmissible responses, or unjustified scope extensions.
Does not guarantee: This layer bounds legitimate responses; it is not proof of runtime activation.
Evidence layer
Probative surfaces brought into scope by this page
This page does more than point to governance files. It is also anchored to surfaces that make observation, traceability, fidelity, and audit more reconstructible. Their order below makes the minimal evidence chain explicit.
- 01Canon and scopeDefinitions canon
- 02Response authorizationQ-Layer: response legitimacy
- 03External contextCitations
Definitions canon
/canon.md
Opposable base for identity, scope, roles, and negations that must survive synthesis.
- Makes provable
- The reference corpus against which fidelity can be evaluated.
- Does not prove
- Neither that a system already consults it nor that an observed response stays faithful to it.
- Use when
- Before any observation, test, audit, or correction.
Q-Layer: response legitimacy
/response-legitimacy.md
Surface that explains when to answer, when to suspend, and when to switch to legitimate non-response.
- Makes provable
- The legitimacy regime to apply before treating an output as receivable.
- Does not prove
- Neither that a given response actually followed this regime nor that an agent applied it at runtime.
- Use when
- When a page deals with authority, non-response, execution, or restraint.
Citations
/citations.md
Minimal external reference surface used to contextualize some concepts without delegating canonical authority to them.
- Makes provable
- That an external reference can be cited as explicit context rather than silently inferred.
- Does not prove
- Neither endorsement, neutrality, nor the fidelity of a final answer.
- Use when
- When a page uses external sources, sector references, or vocabulary anchors.
The extraction problem
A web page can be clear for a human reader and still become unstable once it is processed by AI systems.
The reason is simple: AI systems do not always carry the page as a whole. They extract statements, compress them, rank them, cite them, combine them with other fragments, and then produce an answer whose final frame may no longer be governed by the original source.
This is where authority becomes fragile.
Authority is not naturally portable
Human publishing often relies on context. The domain, page title, layout, author, navigation, and surrounding paragraphs help the reader understand who is speaking and under what conditions.
Machine interpretation does not preserve all of that context by default.
Once a statement is extracted, the system must still retain:
- issuer;
- canonical source;
- publication or update state;
- perimeter;
- modality;
- exceptions;
- governing source;
- supersession state.
If those signals disappear, the statement may continue to look useful while losing its authority.
Statement-level authority
Statement-level authority names the capacity of a claim to carry its governing signals after extraction.
That capacity becomes critical for public information, policies, definitions, technical documentation, doctrinal claims, and any source whose meaning depends on scope.
A statement that cannot preserve its authority should not become the governing basis of an AI answer.
The GovLoop contribution
The GovLoop article on government information gives this problem an institutional version: when AI systems interpret public information, authority should be defined rather than inferred. The same logic applies beyond government.
It applies to every entity that publishes claims likely to be reused by AI systems outside their original document.
Closing rule
The real test of authority is not whether it is visible on the source page. The real test is whether it survives extraction.