Change Principles

Knowledge changes preserve the difference between a source, observation, claim, relationship, resolution, and decision-scoped view. A change is safe only when it keeps rejected, adverse, ambiguous, stale, and superseded evidence reconstructable alongside the current projection.

Classify the evidence change

Changed surface	Questions to answer	Required evidence
source adapter	Which release, fields, license, pagination, and rejection behavior changed?	source fixture, provenance, loss report, and failed records
identifier resolution	Which namespace, species, isoform, ambiguity, and precedence rules apply?	unique, ambiguous, unresolved, and wrong-context cases
evidence or claim model	Did relationship direction, uncertainty, context, or derivation meaning change?	round trip, invariant, and consumer interpretation proof
graph construction	Can order, duplicates, dangling edges, or unreachable records change the result?	deterministic build and hostile integrity corpus
trust or freshness policy	Which sources or claims change posture under the new rule?	policy identity, before/after audit, and boundary dates
contradiction detection	Which opposing records now cluster or escape review?	directional, contextual, shared-lineage, and quantitative conflicts
reconciliation	What evidence wins, loses, splits, or remains held, and why?	preview, resolution record, alternatives, and belief delta
coverage or sufficiency	What denominator and search scope define the gap?	represented, missing, unresolved, and unavailable source sets
decision brief	Does the rendered view still match canonical evidence?	fingerprint, regeneration, and downstream consumer proof
persisted schema	Can old evidence be read without changing meaning or losing history?	old/new fixtures, migration path, and explicit loss policy

flowchart LR
    change["evidence change"] --> source["source and identity fixtures"]
    source --> conflict["support, contradiction, and ambiguity"]
    conflict --> integrity["graph and lineage integrity"]
    integrity --> view["decision-scoped view comparison"]
    view --> limits["coverage and limitation statement"]

Invariants

• source origin, version, retrieval, license, and derivation remain attached;
• biological identity never drops namespace, species, isoform, or ambiguity;
• relationship direction and context are explicit and tested asymmetrically;
• unresolved and rejected inputs survive ingestion reporting;
• contradiction resolution retains the losing evidence and rationale;
• confidence dimensions are not collapsed across source, claim, and decision;
• graph order does not alter the current projection;
• “no evidence found” names the search scope and unavailable sources; and
• new evidence supersedes rather than rewrites cited history.

Review downstream briefs and decisions whenever a change can alter support, contradiction, freshness, coverage, or sufficiency. If the affected consumer has not been evaluated, report local evidence-contract proof and leave the broader decision consequence unresolved.