ADR 0044: Research interchange preserves content identity separately from authority

Context

Issue #1357 requires complete and selected research interchange, explicit Fork governance, and citations that distinguish a Branch head from an immutable Version. Existing native owners validate selected content, immutable identities, contribution mappings, portable components, and Project publication. Correctness is regime A: execution, hostile-input refusal, failure injection, and reopen.

A research registry is also an operational authority: its Branch heads and retention roots keep local research active. Copying the whole registry would include unrelated history and retain ancestors outside the export selection. Copying only graph bytes would lose Version identity and research provenance.

Decision

Use the existing portable-v2 manifest and authenticated versioned components. Register a research component containing native immutable content commitments and an explicit bounded closure of required payloads. Complete materialization preserves the original Version record and identity commitment. Every subset or redaction receives a distinct projection identity and cites its source Version. Package and transport digests remain separate from research identities.

Record the original Project citation for each retained Version. A Fork can create local research while retaining acceptance evidence from another Project; those Project identities and genealogy remain distinct. Conflicting citations for one immutable Version are rejected.

Carry selected genealogy and acceptance evidence as historical provenance, not as imported live Branch heads or destination governance decisions. Historical ancestor references need identity metadata; they do not require full ancestor payloads. The selected Version’s incorporated field baselines travel with its native content. Missing historical expansion remains explicitly unavailable.

A live Branch reference resolves its current head once. An immutable Version reference never follows a later head. Both expose the exact Version, original base, origin, and derivative authorship without assigning a hosting URL.

Import verifies the research component, native schema and producer requirements, content closure, and identity commitments before publication. It cannot accept conflicting content under an already known immutable identity. Native retained Version registration and historical provenance are separate from creating an active local Branch. The explicit Fork operation supplies independent Project metadata, access/governance declarations, and ontology disposition; source acceptance evidence does not become a local promotion or policy decision.

Use one existing Project CURRENT publication for imported content and its durable receipt. Before replacement, refusal leaves prior authority intact. After replacement, report and reconcile the committed outcome, including reopen or acknowledgement failures. Retry uses the durable operation identity and exact request commitment. Cleanup cannot turn supported replay into another import.

Alternatives

Copying an entire operational registry is simpler to serialize but violates selection privacy, independent governance, and bounded ancestor retention. Exporting a graph snapshot alone fits existing portable imports but cannot meet immutable Version, baseline, or accepted-contribution preservation. A second archive format would duplicate the existing verifier and transport identity rules. Extending registered portable components keeps one verifier.

Consequences

Interchange must validate historical provenance without installing it as live local authority. Required research schema/capability changes fail closed for unsupported readers; no pre-v1 migration promise is introduced. Expanded and bundled packages share semantic identity and differ only in transport identity. The first implementation must prove complete, disjoint, and redacted round trips, selected history without ancestor expansion, and explicit Fork independence.