Identity

Asks What makes this the same thing twice?

What makes a thing the same thing across time, across systems and across restatements. Identity is the hinge interoperability turns on: without a stable handle that outlives any label, two systems holding the same thing are holding two things, and no join between them is sound.

In this model Every row carries an immutable locator, and every registry states how its rows are named. A record that answers to an outside system carries that system's own identifier alongside.

Represented by

The engineering standards that state this foundation directly, among the works the commitments stand on.

• The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardshipWilkinson et al., Scientific Data 3, 160018, 2016
• Cool URIs don't changeBerners-Lee, W3C, 1998

Commitments it asks for — 9

• enforcedStore one canonical relationship assertion
• enforcedKeep concrete creative separate from its classifications
• enforcedDelivery custody is a named chain, not one vendor field
• enforcedAn exemplar shows the shape a record takes
• enforcedAn identifier names one thing, and never a second
• enforcedAn address is a label's, made once
• enforcedA page is shareable as itself
• enforcedAn answer the graph gives has an address
• enforcedA person is known at a declared level

What the build enforces — 9

• registry integritycanonical graph integrity
  Endpoints resolve, relationship triples are unique, and compositions remain acyclic where the model requires it.
• registry integrityadmission and shape
  Every kind has a valid shape and evidence class, and every row keeps the admission its kind allows: a record names its source, an exemplar names none, and a world record states the public reference it stands on.
• registry integritystable identifiers
  Kind prefixes are unique, every row keeps the identity convention of its kind, and an identifier once retired is never reused: a kind writes each retirement down with its date and its reason, and every number below its highest is a row or a retirement.
• registry integritytyped relationships
  Every relationship has declared endpoint kinds and a governed cardinality.
• registry integrityexemplar admission
  A source-backed row is a record with a durable source reference or an exemplar of the pattern, never both and never neither; a vocabulary term is never an exemplar; and every exemplar answers to the name the exemplar commitment gives it, so renaming one cannot strand the sentence that threads them.
• registry integrityaddress integrity
  Every page address is made once from a label by the law's own scheme and is distinct from every other; every top-level name the site answers is derived from what declares it, and no kind, endpoint or frame name takes another's; every address the site once answered to, a former label's or a retired identifier's, is distinct from every live address and from every other former one, and no row names its own label as a former one; every projection answers at a declared name, once, and is cut from fields the artifact carries; every operation reads a projection; and every endpoint answers only what its direction allows.
• ring:6the site ring
  The built site is the whole graph and nothing else: every page indexed, addressed by a label, self-contained and free of any private name; every structured-data identifier a subject the standards export wrote; every page unfurling to its own card, and every sitemap entry naming that card as its image; every journey with its SCXML twin; the sitemaps held to the graph; a graph under a megabyte. And the host held to the ground: the Worker serving the build as its assets and running first for every request; the allowlist and the redirect list it carries cut from the graph, every address the graph once answered to in the list with the status the law gives it and none of them a page; every endpoint served by the files it names; and the beacon sending to the collector's endpoint and nowhere else; every projection the law declares in the build, served by the files that say they serve it, and named in llms.txt; and the Worker reading the host's caching rules and owed headers from the law, writing none of its own; every answer a question carries a page where the walk is non-empty and nowhere else, its structured data naming exactly the rows the walk reached.
• eval:enginethe engine agrees with itself
  The binder that runs while the graph is built and the binder that runs in a reader's browser find the same bindings: every pattern bound against the whole model to the same instances and the same rows in every role, the published example among them, and every view bound again from every row it answers from, row for row, and the port of the pattern law beside the browser's engine refuses every way a declared pattern can be broken exactly as the law does, and every question bound again from every row of its root kind finds an answer exactly where the build published one and nothing where it did not.
• registry integritymoves are identified
  The kernel's resolution names a kind the registry declares, a specification on which the instrumenting kind declares its level, and a row of that kind at which nobody is told apart; and every event that triggers a move is observed by at least one instrument identifying above that level. A move counted only by instruments that cannot tell one person from another is a move nobody made.