A relationship says what kind of claim it makes

Answers Modality · Epistemology · Semantics

A cardinality says how many; it never says whether. Each relationship therefore declares the claim it makes: constitutive, true by what the thing is; dispositional, what may or typically hold at design time; evidential, an observed linkage that carries interpretation and nothing more; causal, the source brings the target about; or advisory, a recommendation. PROV-O draws the line the model most depends on: influence is the weakest relation, and generation - where the target did not exist before - is a strict specialisation of it. Attribution is evidential and may never be read as causal. A verb that hedges may only make a dispositional or advisory claim, and no claim class may sit unused.

What goes wrong without it

Two links can have the same shape and entirely different standing — one true by definition, one merely typical, one observed, one causal. Provenance vocabularies separate influence from generation for exactly this reason, and a cause read out of a co-occurrence is the error they were built to prevent. Where that distinction is not carried on the relationship itself, an observed co-occurrence is eventually read as a cause.

What proves it — 1

Each is a gate the build runs: a check inside a ring, a whole ring, or an eval beside them. A build stops at the first that refuses.

• registry integrityrelational claim
  Every relationship declares what kind of claim it makes, a hedging verb claims no more than it says, a typing is always constitutive because it says what a thing is, one verb carries one claim, and no claim class sits unused.

Derived from — 2

• W3CPROV-O: The PROV Ontology
• Media Rating CouncilOutcomes and Data Quality Standards

Relationships it licenses

triggers event · attributed to tactic · observes event · informs intelligence · advises purpose

Where this model stands

Every relationship declares a claim class, and a hedging verb may claim no more than it says.

Attribution to a tactic is evidential; triggering an event is causal. They are different classes of assertion.

Modality is carried by the claim rather than smuggled into a bound: a cardinality only ever says how many.

What it does not claim

No relationship is marked causal on operational evidence; the one causal claim is a design determination about what an Action is, not a measured effect.

RUL-017