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.
AI Citation Registry vs interpretive governance
An AI Citation Registry can preserve attribution. Interpretive governance is broader: it determines whether a cited, extracted, or reused statement remains legitimate inside the response.
This distinction prevents a useful provenance idea from being mistaken for the whole governance layer.
What an AI Citation Registry can solve
A citation registry can help a system identify:
- the issuing source;
- the canonical location of a statement;
- the publication or update time;
- the jurisdiction or issuing body;
- whether a fragment should be cited as official, archival, superseded, or contextual.
That is valuable. It improves the portability of citation and reduces weak attribution.
What it does not fully solve
Citation infrastructure does not automatically decide:
- whether the answer preserved the source’s perimeter;
- whether the cited statement was generalized beyond scope;
- whether a derivative source structured the response more strongly than the official source;
- whether the system should have asked for clarification;
- whether non-response would have been more legitimate than completion.
Those questions belong to interpretive governance, authority boundary, proof of fidelity, and Q-Layer arbitration.
Site position
A citation registry is a possible implementation of authority preservation at the provenance layer.
Interpretive governance is the broader doctrine that asks what the response may do with the cited material once provenance has been established.
Minimal rule
A cited source is not automatically a governing source. A registry can help establish where a statement comes from; it does not by itself prove that the final answer preserved meaning, perimeter, modality, and limits.