Canon

Canon — Blessed Claim Memory

Canon is the act of promoting Claims from transient decision context to long-term institutional truth.

Overview

A Canon entry takes one or more Claim IDs that have proven their worth through DLR decisions and elevates them to blessed status — the curated subset of claims that an organization treats as ground truth until explicitly superseded.

Think of it this way: Claims are born during decisions. Most claims live and die within a single DLR. But some claims prove so reliable, so foundational, that they deserve to persist beyond the episode that created them. Canon is the ceremony that makes that happen.

Schema: specs/canon.schema.json

When to Create a Canon Entry

Canon entries are appropriate when:

Trigger	Example
A claim has survived multiple DLR cycles without contradiction	"Supplier X delivers within 48 hours" — confirmed across 12 decisions
A policy decision has been ratified	"All SignalSource claims require ≥2 independent sources"
An organizational fact needs to be centralized	"Our SLA for Tier 1 incidents is 15 minutes"
A forecast has been validated by outcome	"Q4 demand will exceed 10,000 units" — confirmed by actuals

Anatomy of a Canon Entry

Field	Purpose
canonId	Stable ID (CANON-YYYY-NNNN). Never reused.
title	Human-readable name for the blessed truth
claimIds	Ordered list of promoted Claim IDs. First = primary.
dlrIds	Decision records that produced these claims
blessedBy	Role or authority that approved promotion
blessedAt	Timestamp of the blessing ceremony
expiresAt	When this canon entry should be reviewed for renewal
scope	Domain + region + context boundaries
version	Semantic version — bumped on amendment
supersedes	Prior canonId this entry replaces
seal	SHA-256 hash + version + sealed timestamp
tags	Free-form tags for search and filtering

Canon Lifecycle

Claim born in DLR
    ↓
Claim survives multiple decisions
    ↓
Authority blesses claim → Canon entry created
    ↓
Canon sealed (immutable hash)
    ↓
                ┌─ Canon remains valid (ground truth)
                │
                └─ New evidence arrives
                       ↓
                   Retcon or supersession
                       ↓
                   New Canon entry (supersedes old)

Relationship to Other Primitives

Primitive	Relationship
Claim	Canon promotes claims to long-term memory
DLR	Canon traces back to the decisions that validated the claims
Retcon	When a canon entry's claims are wrong, Retcon corrects them
IRIS	WHAT_IS_CANON queries resolve which claims are currently blessed
Drift	Drift detection monitors canon claims for staleness
Seal	Canon entries are sealed — append-only, never overwritten

Composability

In graph terms, a Canon entry is a promotion operation: it tags a subgraph of claims as authoritative. The claimIds array selects nodes; the dlrIds array traces provenance; the seal locks the selection in place.

Canon entries can themselves be superseded, creating a version chain of institutional truth. The supersedes field links new canon to old, preserving full history.

Related Pages

• Unified Atomic Claims — the Claim Primitive that Canon promotes
• Retcon — retroactive correction of canon entries
• Sealing & Episodes — immutability model
• Schemas — all JSON Schema specs
• IRIS — query resolution engine