Governed Crossing

A governed crossing record is evidence that data crossed from a person’s own system into shared infrastructure: what was authorized to cross, by whom, when, under what exposure claim, and where it landed. This repository holds the ways that record is written down (bindings), the rules a record must meet beyond its schema (conformance), and, in time, test vectors and a reference verifier.

The record’s meaning is defined by the seam:CrossingRecord vocabulary in Seam Stack. This repository does not redefine it; each binding maps onto it.

Status

Draft. The first binding is a set of AT Protocol lexicons in the org.governedcrossing.temp.* namespace. Anything under temp may change without notice. Stable org.governedcrossing.* names will be published separately and will not be implied by use of the drafts.

Principles

The record lives with the person. The canonical copy of a crossing record stays on the emitting party’s own system. AT Protocol carries copies of it, never its home.
A public copy discloses no more than the crossing did. When a crossing is itself public, the full record may be published. When it is private, at most a small commitment is published (a fingerprint of the record, who issued it, and when); the full record travels privately to the other party.
Crossings that did not go through leave no public trace. Nothing is published about a blocked crossing, or about one whose act the emitter has not seen succeed. The record stays with the party.
Records are signed and non-repudiable. Every record carries its emitter’s signature, following the ATProtocol Attestation Specification v1.0. This is a deliberate difference from permissioned spaces, which are designed to be deniable.
Records describe what crossed; they never contain it. A record carries digests and references only.
Exposure claims are upper bounds. Once data crosses into a globally indexed system, nobody can promise it will not be copied. Records say so (exposure-unbounded) instead of claiming more control than exists.

Layout

lexicons/org/governedcrossing/temp/
  crossingRecord.json   one record type for all crossing records; recordType tells them apart
  commitment.json       the public commitment to a privately held record
  defs.json             signature type, record references, crossing extensions
CONFORMANCE.md          rules a record must meet that a lexicon cannot express

Relation to the vocabulary

The lexicons list every value currently registered for the vocabulary’s controlled fields. The published vocabulary page lists an earlier subset and is being updated.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

MIT License · Built with AI-collaborative methods · Intellectual direction and authorial responsibility: Jedi Wright · Systems of Thought · UX Minds, LLC

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