Provenance

Vocabulary for crediting prior work and recording design history. A resource cites the sources it draws on and the decisions that shaped it, leaving a navigable breadcrumb of reasoning rather than a flat assertion.

The provenance vocabulary answers "where did this come from?" for any Kanonak resource. A Source names an external piece of prior work — a Standard, an Implementation, or a Discussion — and the citation properties relate a resource to it: buildsOn, informedBy, divergesFrom, and conformsTo express how the prior work bears on the citing resource. Relationships between Kanonak resources themselves — supersededBy, mergedInto, complements — live here too, since they are statements of lineage. Attribution works the same way: Author and Contributor credit the Persons who wrote and shaped a resource — distinct from a protocol's steward, which names the governing organization. A Design Decision records a choice and its Decision Status, so the reasoning behind an ontology is part of the graph instead of lost to chat logs.

AcceptedAlternatives ConsideredThe options that were weighed and set aside, and why. May embed [[reference]] links.AuthorCredits the principal author(s) of a resource - who wrote it and should get primary credit. Accepts a single Person reference or a YAML list when there are…Builds OnLinks a resource to prior art it directly builds upon. No domain is asserted - any resource (a protocol, a convention, a rule, a design decision) may cite what…ComplementsLinks a resource to another it is designed to work alongside. Generalized from protocols 1.0.0. No domain is asserted.Conforms ToLinks a resource to a standard it adheres to. No domain is asserted.ConsequencesWhat follows from the decision - the trade-offs accepted and the obligations it creates. May embed [[reference]] links.ContextThe situation and forces that made the decision necessary. May embed [[reference]] links.ContributorCredits additional people who contributed to a resource without being a principal author. Accepts a single Person reference or a YAML list. No domain is…Decided DateISO date (yyyy-mm-dd) on which the decision was taken.DecisionThe choice that was made. May embed [[reference]] links.Decision StatusThe lifecycle state of a DesignDecision. A closed, intrinsic enumeration: these instances are part of this vocabulary's own semantics, unlike open-world…Design DecisionA recorded design decision in the spirit of an Architecture Decision Record: the context that forced a choice, the decision taken, the alternatives weighed,…DiscussionA design discussion, issue, or thread that informed a decision - an internal issue, a request for comments, a recorded conversation.Diverges FromLinks a resource to prior art it deliberately departs from or improves upon - records where this design chose differently and, via sourceDescription or an…ImplementationAn existing system or tool whose approach is prior art - how others solved the same problem (for example, a package manager's deprecation or retraction model).Informed ByLinks a resource to background prior art that informed it without being a direct foundation. No domain is asserted.Merged IntoLinks a resource to another that absorbed it. Generalized from protocols 1.0.0. No domain is asserted.PersonA human credited with authoring or contributing to a resource. A Person's display name uses the conventional rdfs.label, with an optional rdfs.comment for a…ProposedRejectedSourceA citeable piece of prior art that a Kanonak resource builds on or responds to - an external standard, an existing implementation, or a design discussion. A…Source DateISO date (yyyy-mm-dd) on which the source was published or last relevant.Source URLThe canonical external URL where the source can be read. External links belong here; [[reference]] placeholders in prose resolve only Kanonak resources and…StandardA formal, normative external specification - an IETF RFC, a W3C Recommendation, a published versioning or interchange standard.StatusThe lifecycle state of a design decision.SupersededSuperseded ByLinks a resource to a successor that replaces it. Generalized from the protocol-specific property in protocols 1.0.0 so that any resource - a package version,…