info-tech-canon/workplans/INFO-WP-0028-import-manifest-resolution.md

id	type	title	domain	repo	status	owner	topic_slug	created	updated	flavor	state_hub_workstream_id
INFO-WP-0028	workplan	Make import-manifest name resolution a standing check	infotech	info-tech-canon	finished	claude	canon-federation	2026-09-20	2026-09-20	quality	c55e827d-05ab-5911-8206-81cab1d5a329

Import-manifest name resolution

Why

Federation partners declare what they import from InfoTechCanon in a manifest: an artifact path, a pinned SHA-256 of that file's blob, and a list of concept names. Every review so far has verified the hash and recorded the match as evidence. A hash proves the reviewed file is the pinned file. It says nothing about whether the concept named in the manifest exists in it.

Nobody had run the second check until INFO-WP-0027-T04, and it failed in nine places across the two accepted boundaries:

• SecurityCanon: five of twelve. Artifact resolved to the DevSecOps build artifact, because Core defines CanonArtifact and not Artifact. Relationship is the identity model's, not Core's. Ownership is the Organization Model's. AccessOperations is a compaction of ITC-ACCESS Operation. PrincipalType appears nowhere upstream.
• InterfaceCanon: four of twenty-five. Two were this repository's omission, since SoftwareSystem and SoftwareComponent sat in a seed-concept list that extraction could not read. Two more, Interface and Endpoint, are pinned to Landscape while the Network Model declares them.

None of those was a contested concept. Every one was a citation naming the wrong artifact, or a name InfoTechCanon never used. They are cheap to find and cheap to fix — once something looks.

Two conditions make the check possible now that were not true before. INFO-WP-0027 gave every defining artifact an owned_concepts declaration, so the ownership index resolves 718 concepts rather than 164. And the index moves when the corpus moves, so a partner's pins can go stale without anyone editing the partner's file.

What this is not

Not a claim that a resolving manifest is a correct one. Resolution proves the name exists and names one owner; whether the partner uses the concept as its owner defines it is a semantic question that stays with boundary review. Not an enforcement surface over partner repositories either — the check reports, the partner decides.

Reusable manifest review

id: INFO-WP-0028-T01
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "7c4e8a21-51a9-5658-b56f-01204e4cba34"

Add a read-only import-review command taking a path to any partner manifest, in the shape emission-review already uses for source-owned cadence declarations: the canon validates a file it does not own and returns JSON.

Per declared concept, report whether the name resolves in the ownership index, which artifact owns it, and whether that is the artifact the manifest pins. Per entry, re-check the pinned SHA-256 against the blob at the declared source commit, so hash and name are checked in one pass and neither can be recorded without the other.

Exit non-zero on a failed resolution so a partner can run it in CI. The command must work against an arbitrary manifest path without registering it, and must not require the partner repository to be checked out beside this one.

Accepted manifests as a standing check

id: INFO-WP-0028-T02
status: done
priority: high
state_hub_task_id: "7491a8ac-1f96-5f2e-a9eb-f3995c528cae"

A partner-run command catches errors when the partner runs it. It does not catch the case that produced two of the nine findings: InfoTechCanon changes, and pins that were correct become stale without the partner touching anything.

Register the manifests of accepted boundaries under infospace/interfaces/, as copies with their source repository, revision and retrieval date recorded, and resolve them on every make check. A concept that stops resolving, or resolves to a different owner than the manifest pins, is a warning naming the partner and the concept — not an error, because it is not this repository's file to fix and a stale partner pin must not fail the canon's own build.

Decide and record whether a registered manifest copy is provenance-preserving source, like seeds/, or a generated artifact refreshed from the partner. The answer determines who may edit it.

Record resolution in boundary reviews

id: INFO-WP-0028-T03
status: done
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "20eab825-8236-583e-b246-cbe86122cc7c"

Make the resolution result part of what a boundary review states, alongside the hash result, so an acceptance cannot again record "all hashes match" as though it were evidence of correct citation. The SecurityCanon and InterfaceCanon boundary files already carry a T04 re-verification section in roughly the right shape; generalise it into the review kit under infospace/agent/ so the next boundary review starts from a template that asks both questions.

Close the two open partner findings

id: INFO-WP-0028-T04
status: done
priority: medium
state_hub_task_id: "cdf31f69-7a2e-5be0-a988-145dee48c063"

InterfaceCanon's Interface and Endpoint pins resolve to the Network Model rather than Landscape. The accepted boundary already treats those as contextual mappings rather than exact aliases, so this is a citation fix, not a semantic dispute. It was raised with interface-canon by State Hub message 13d355f2-554b-4a3a-a0ef-3f69eeafeae9 on 2026-09-20; follow it up and confirm the correction, or record their decision to qualify the pins in place instead.

Re-run T01 against both partner manifests afterwards and record the result in each boundary file.

Done when

Any partner manifest can be checked by one command that verifies hash and name together; accepted manifests are re-resolved on every make check with drift reported as a warning that names the partner; the review kit asks for both results; and no open resolution finding remains against either accepted boundary.

Result — 2026-09-20 (T01, T02, T03)

import-review takes any manifest path and returns JSON: per concept, whether the name resolves in the ownership index and to which artifact; per entry, whether the pinned SHA-256 matches the blob at the declared source commit. Both checks run in one pass, so neither can be recorded without the other. It exits non-zero on a finding, reads JSON or YAML, and needs no partner checkout. It also carries its own limit in the payload: resolution proves a name exists and names one owner, and nothing more.

Manifests are registered under infospace/interfaces/manifests/ with manifests.yaml recording the partner, the source path, the partner revision and the retrieval date. They are provenance-preserving copies, owned by the partner — the decision T02 asked for. Correcting a copy to make a check pass is explicitly forbidden in the file itself: fix it in the partner repository and retrieve it again. validate re-resolves them and reports drift as federation_import_drift, a warning naming the partner, never an error.

Both accepted boundaries carry a standing-check section with the current result. The review kit gains extension-boundary-review.template.md, which requires hash count, resolution count and conflict count as three separate lines, and an operating rule stating that one is never evidence of the other.

Verified against both live manifests: security-canon resolves 11 of 11 with six hashes matching; interface-canon resolves 23 of 25 with seven hashes matching, the two exceptions being the known Interface and Endpoint pins. The check finds exactly what the T04 audit found by hand, which is the point.

Result — 2026-09-20 (T04)

Corrected in interface-canon at 20d7bfc2, on the owner's instruction rather than by waiting for the unanswered message.

The cause was a third instance of one pattern. Interface and Endpoint were pinned twice, to ITC-LAND and to ITC-NET, because ITC-LAND section 13.2 lists them in a seed-concept block while the Network Model defines them. A list of names was read as a definition — the same mistake as CARING's Scope ladder (R-1), CARING's Environment values (F-3), and the Landscape seeds that hid SoftwareSystem and SoftwareComponent (T04 of INFO-WP-0027). The ITC-LAND pins are dropped, and Landscape section 13.2 now states in InfoTechCanon that Interface, Endpoint and API are pointers and that the Network Model owns the first two, so the next reader does not repeat it.

No disposition changes on either side; the mapping tables citing ITC-LAND section 13.2 as a related seed stand. The registered copy is refreshed to the corrected revision, both boundaries now resolve completely — security-canon 11 of 11, interface-canon 23 of 23 — and make check carries no drift warnings.

Closure — 2026-09-20

All four tasks are done. Any partner manifest can be checked by one command that verifies pinned hash and concept-name resolution together; accepted manifests are registered as provenance-preserving partner-owned copies and re-resolved on every make check, with drift reported as a warning naming the partner; the review kit requires both counts and says that one is never evidence of the other; and no resolution finding remains open against either accepted boundary.

The pattern worth naming, since it recurred four times in one day: a canon lists concept names in one artifact and defines them in another, and every consumer of the list treats the listing as ownership. Declarations and this check make that visible, but the underlying habit is a documentation one, and no check will stop it being written again.