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Concepts

Trust, Provenance & Authority Boundaries

What is authoritative, what is advisory, and what is derived and illustrative.

Every reviewed artifact in Valence sits on one side of a single line: authoritative or advisory. This page states that line once, in full, so other pages can point back to it instead of restating it.

The manifest is the source of truth

registry_data/manifest.toml is the single authoritative, human-editable source file of the registry. The Parquet sidecar is derived from it at publish and is never hand-edited.

Source bytes are authoritative

Visual previews are illustrative; source mesh bytes and manifest metadata remain authoritative.

Derived assets are never authoritative

LODs (mesh_lods), previews, thumbnails, and the Parquet sidecar all make browsing fast, but none of them is the science. Validation and scientific use go back to the source mesh bytes and the manifest — never to a derived render asset.

Diagram: registry_data/manifest.toml and source mesh bytes are authoritative; the Parquet sidecar, mesh_lods, thumbnails, and globe-index.json are derived from them and never authoritative; validation and science read only from the manifest and the source mesh bytes.

Candidate proposal (advisory) vs Approved Region (authoritative)

A Region is geometry; the authority question is Scope. Candidate proposals are advisory. An approved region is the artifact that crosses the authority boundary and can be used for enforcement-grade scope verdicts. Only an ApprovedRegion may enter enforcement — check_scope_against_region takes an ApprovedRegion; a RegionProposal (status non_authoritative_proposal) can never reach it.

L1 verdict = declared scope only (advisory); L2 verdict = bound to an Approved Region (authoritative). Ranking orders candidates for review. It is not a claim of scientific optimality, simulation accuracy, or automatic selection.

Verdicts are computed, never opined

A Verdict is “the deterministic outcome of checking Scope against an Approved Region (or, at L1, against declared scope only). A Verdict is computed, never opined.” No LLM, no randomness: the Ruleset behind a Verdict is versioned and tamper-evident, and verdicts are canonical-JSON digest-bound.

Diagram: candidate proposals, rankings, L1 advisory verdicts, and visual previews are advisory and non-authoritative; an approved region reached via human approval (actor and reason) becomes an authoritative L2 signed verdict, alongside authoritative manifest metadata and source mesh bytes.

Publication and generation are gated

Passing automated gates does not publish a mesh. Publication is a maintainer decision that updates the manifest and registry data. Candidate generation is owner-only and fails closed when the proprietary engine is absent.

Provenance

Valence expects real-world mesh records to carry provenance — where an artifact came from plus its chain of custody (contributor, upstream URL, verification).