Memory governance
Canonical definition. This page establishes the stable meaning of the term “memory governance” within the doctrinal framework published on gautierdorval.com.
This page constitutes neither an operational method, nor an industrializable procedure, nor a promise of result. It serves to reduce ambiguity by describing a conceptual perimeter and interpretation boundaries.
Definition
Memory governance: doctrinal extension applied to stateful systems (agents, advanced RAG, persisted memories) aimed at preventing the fossilization of inferences into facts, by imposing explicit typing of memory objects, minimum traceability, temporal integrity, and compliance breach conditions upon structural modifications.
Scope
- Concerns systems that persist states (memory objects) and reuse them between t0 and t1.
- Covers consolidation (fusion, compression, summary), invalidation, archiving, and controlled forgetting.
- Adds a temporal constraint: a statement can be valid at one moment and invalid at another.
Minimum components
- Typed memory object: origin, status, and statement nature made explicit.
- Traceability: source reference, or explicit declaration of source absence (blocking for factualization).
- Temporal integrity: validity perimeter and prevention of out-of-time reuse.
- Governed consolidation: controlled transformation that preserves provenance and prevents confidence escalation through rewriting.
- Controlled forgetting: explicit invalidation/archiving, without silent deletion.
- Compliance breach: when a structural modification alters the nature of a persisted object, a compliance audit is required.
