Core concepts

OCP works by keeping states that are often blurred together—source, observation, inference, acceptance, permission, and preservation—separate and inspectable.


Four related views

OCP profile compositionConversation, Artifact, and Provider Adapter profile records compose through references into an authorized context package without merging their semantics.OCP 0.4 PROFILE COMPOSITIONConversationmessage DAG + selected leafArtifactwork + representation + lineageProvider adaptermapping run + loss reportContext packageauthorized references · bounded views · omissions
Composition preserves each profile’s authority, custody, and disclosure boundaries.
ViewCarriesDoes not imply
ContextReviewed statements and preferencesUniversal truth or action authority
EvidenceSupporting or challenging source recordsAcceptance
ArtifactsLogical objects and byte representationsRights or provenance by possession
ConversationsMessage graphs and content partsEndorsement of embedded instructions

Candidate, accepted, disputed, withdrawn

A context_item carries review and lifecycle state. Imported or inferred material starts as candidate. Acceptance is scoped to a context space and requires a decision record. Later evidence can dispute, supersede, or withdraw an item without rewriting history.

References carry revision and integrity

Normative references use an identifier, revision, schema URI, and—where required—a digest. This makes stale or substituted data detectable and allows the same logical object to evolve through explicit revisions.

Provenance is not preservation

Source authority
The provider or system that is authoritative for the source record’s original meaning.
Runtime source
The software and execution context that produced the current OCP representation.
Custody
Who holds a representation, whether it depends on the source, and whether its bytes are independently retrievable.
Lineage
Declared transformation and derivation events. Lineage does not itself prove correctness.

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