ADR 0042: Contextual research decisions extend immutable knowledge

Context

Issue #1353 requires competing research claims and contextual canonical acceptance without turning confidence, supported status or Branch membership into authority. Existing assertions, evidence, provenance, status events, supersession and hypotheses already own their respective immutable records. Branches now publish selected research through their owning Project’s CURRENT under ADR 0041.

Decision

Extend the knowledge/epistemic schema registry with native immutable research classification, relation and scoped decision records. Reference existing assertion and provenance identities; do not duplicate claim text, evidence, confidence or hypothesis membership in a parallel claim engine. Evidence remains in the existing Source/Artifact/evidence owners. Research categories distinguish machine extraction, analyst assertion, interpretation, hypothesis/theory and annotation without changing the meaning of existing statusless assertions.

Canonical decisions identify Project authority, optional community, research context and typed subject (node, relationship or assertion). Acceptance/revocation history is independent of confidence and supported/disputed status. A Branch challenge or suppression is scoped research history; it cannot retract or rewrite its parent’s assertion or canonical decisions. Immutable successors record revisions and replacement without changing prior assertion bytes or conceptual origin.

Claim relations explicitly represent alternative-to, contradicts/disputes, refines, supersedes and supports. Existing supersession remains the owner for assertion succession. Competing claims can coexist. Import/integration and canonical promotion are separate decisions; source-context acceptance is provenance and never implicitly grants destination acceptance. A later Proposal publication may compose both explicit decisions through the same authority.

Rust derives Arrow views of current decisions and full history. Default graph Cypher and algorithms remain unchanged; only explicit knowledge/belief projection uses epistemic decisions. Knowledge suppression affects its scoped knowledge view, never all graph objects referenced by a claim. Read surfaces distinguish inherited/source decisions from decisions made in the requested destination context and preserve creator, run, evidence, origin Branch and exact Version.

Canonical acceptance/integration decisions are current Project history, scoped by authority and context, not frozen research state. Their data-bearing owner records belong to the knowledge schema registry and publish as Parquet under the existing research history capability. Complete Project or Branch restoration must preserve this history, just as it preserves operation receipts. Frozen claim classification, relation and local-change records remain epistemic research content. Reads present these two layers explicitly; restored old research never rewrites later canonical history. A source-context decision is still inspectable provenance but cannot become a destination-context decision by inheritance.

Project operations use existing native participant publication. Branch operations prepare the same domain changes in the private Branch facade and publish one new Branch Version through the existing Project CURRENT/receipt protocol. There is no second durable authority. Exact request identity, cancellation before publication, structured conflict refusal, recovery and receipt reconciliation remain mandatory. Python, asynchronous Node and CLI only transport the native request and Arrow/control results.

Alternatives

Adding canonical values to assertion supported status would be smaller but would conflate independent decisions and silently change existing projection semantics. A new standalone claims store would duplicate assertion/evidence ownership and introduce another publication authority. Both alternatives are rejected.

Consequences and proof

Selection, Bring, retention, schema validation and field-baseline owners must carry selected research records without importing unrelated context or granting source authority at a destination. Added families need explicit registry entries, closed values, bounds, canonical fingerprints and fixture/inventory updates.

Acceptance requires real parent and Branch claims with competing alternatives, separate integration/promotion, immutable revision history, graph-invariant knowledge suppression, exact retry/failure refusal, durable reopen and native binding parity. This ADR is a design decision; it is not completion evidence for #1353. Proposal review workflow remains owned by #1356.