What may be said. Who may act.
A claim license says what you may say about a result. A reliance license says who may act on it, for which decision, how strong the evidence must be, how stale it may get, and when it expires. They are separate on purpose.
The claim license
What may be said about a result, and no more.
A claim license is issued with the verdict. It bounds the statements that may be made about a result (that an effect occurred, that it was authorized, that it was accepted) to what the bound evidence actually supports, at the ceiling of the weakest evidence class involved.
It is what stops a status from saying more than the evidence does. A producer may describe its own work only within the claim license; anything beyond it is an assertion, and assertions carry no reliance.
The reliance license
Who may rely on it, for which decision, how strong the evidence must be, how stale it may get, and until when.
A reliance license, a grant of reliance, is a record, not a flag. It names the determination and the issuing authority, then five things that scope it. Without it, the distinction below lives in someone’s head.
| Field | What it settles |
|---|---|
| Relying party | Who may rely on it. A single global claim addressed to nobody is not a license. |
| Permitted decision | Which decision they may use it for. Exactly one decision type from a fixed list. |
| Evidence ceiling | How strong the evidence has to be before that decision is allowed. A determination whose current basis sits below the named point is not available for that decision. |
| Freshness bound | How stale the result may get before it stops counting. Declared per license by the issuing authority, out in the open. |
| Expiry | The date it expires regardless. |
Good enough to draft a summary≠Good enough to move money
A ceiling refuses rather than warns. A determination below the point a license names is not available for that decision, and no caveat is attached to make it usable anyway.
Licenses and edges
The permission, and the recorded fact that somebody used it.
A license is the scoped permission to rely. An edge is the recorded fact that this party did. Ordinarily little records who came to depend on a result, so when it turns out to be wrong, the question of who acted on it is answered by asking around.
Written at the moment of reliance
Not reconstructed later from logs, and not inferred from who had permission. The edge exists because taking the license is how the party reached the result.
Chains are built, not assumed
A consumer that relies on a result and then produces one of its own takes a license for what it produces. The chain exists because each hop was recorded.
The map is only as complete as the recording
Which is why taking the license has to be how a consumer reaches the result, not something noted on the side. Where a consumer can read without taking a license, that read is invisible when the result is later pulled back.
This changes how results are fetched
It does not mean rewriting the systems that fetch them. What is not flexible is the read path: a consumer reaches a consequential result by taking a license.
Purpose types
The standard fixes the shape. The industry supplies the ranking.
If “purpose” is free text, nothing can be computed from it. If the standard hard-codes one industry’s purposes, it only works for that industry.
So what the standard fixes is the shape a purpose type must have: there must be a fixed list of decision types; the industry using it says which of those rank above which, and not every pair has to be ranked; and each license names exactly one decision type from that list.
The standard works over any such ranking without needing to know what the levels mean. Summarizing ranks below transferring funds because that domain says so, not because the standard has an opinion about money.
That is what makes the object portable. A standard that fixed the ranking itself would be welded to whichever industry it borrowed it from.
Three things follow. A determination can be relied upon for one decision and refused for another at the same instant, which a single status field cannot represent. A basis change produces a bounded, named set of affected consumers rather than a broadcast or a search. And an unwind reports itself incomplete, naming the consumer it could not reach, which is the difference between a governed withdrawal and a hopeful one.
Next steps
A license is valid at reliance, not forever.
What happens when the basis underneath it moves is the subject of Continuous Finality.
Continuous Finality
Recomputation, narrowing, withdrawal, and the unwind that reports itself incomplete.
Explore →NextAccepted Work
Work actually permitted to count under declared acceptance conditions.
Explore →PartnersIf others rely on your results
Producers embed the reliance layer so their customers can verify it.
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