facetted-interfaces/INTENT.md

INTENT

Purpose

This repository develops and maintains the FIAM (Facetted Interface Architecture Model) standard and its reference architecture, analytics, and control implementation.

FIAM provides a precise way to describe interfaces as composable facets, connect declared architecture with runtime evidence, and query the resulting architecture without confusing observations with declarations.

Intended Users

The primary users are architects, platform engineers, implementers of interface and architecture tooling, and agents working across the FIAM ecosystem. The repository should make the standard understandable and executable for both humans and automation.

Scope

This repository owns:

• the FIAM vocabulary, canonical model, and conformance rules;
• schemas and examples for declared, observed, and composite architectures;
• reference converters, catalog/index tools, and analytical lenses;
• validation, adversarial fixtures, and semantic-regression checks;
• documentation of versioning, identity, evidence, snapshots, and migration.

It does not own deployment of a consuming platform, a general-purpose service catalog, or the product UI of downstream architecture products.

Architectural Principles

• Keep interface identity, representation shape, and evidence distinct.
• Preserve source records and provenance; inferred correspondence is not a destructive merge.
• Treat declared and observed architecture as complementary projections.
• Make uncertainty, ambiguity, staleness, and missing evidence explicit.
• Prefer deterministic, schema-validated artifacts and reproducible checks.
• Evolve the standard deliberately, with migration and conformance guidance.

Current Baseline

The current repository is a seed containing the FIAM v0.2 Draft 6 reference material under history/FIAM_v0.2_Draft6/. That material is the starting baseline, not yet a complete actively maintained release layout. The first operational priority is to establish ownership, validation, and a clear path from the archived draft to the next maintained FIAM release.

Completion Condition

The intent is being fulfilled when FIAM has a maintained normative release, an executable conformance suite, documented extension and migration rules, and reference tooling that produces trustworthy architecture intelligence from declared and runtime interface evidence.