Identity, Reference & Provenance Tracking

Primes about how entities are named, tracked, and kept traceable over time: identifier assignment and resolution (persistent identifiers, alias-to-authority mapping, retired terms), and the fidelity between records and reality (provenance, record reconciliation, record-reality divergence, authentication).

21 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Alias-to-Authority Mapping — One canonical form for a referent is maintained while every variant label routes many-to-one to it, so identity aggregates while the referent stays reachable by any name.
• Authentication — Binding an asserted identity or origin to admissible evidence through a procedure that yields a verdict, before trust, access, or weight is granted.
• Backtracking — Extend a partial solution one step at a time and reverse the most recent commitment as soon as a constraint proves it cannot succeed, preserving earlier work.
• Boundary Disclosure Card — A small, schematized, standardized disclosure attached at an artifact's reuse boundary so that consuming it and reading it are the same event.
• Chesterton's Fence — The persistence of a structure is evidence that it encodes a constraint, so understand its function before removing it.
• Emic And Etic — A paired dual-description regime in which a phenomenon is captured under an insider scheme closed by participants' competence and an outsider scheme closed by analytic framework, with their divergence treated as a finding.
• Equivalence-Preserving Rewriting — Transforming an object into a behaviourally equivalent but operationally different form under an explicit equivalence relation, then selecting among rewrites by an orthogonal cost criterion.
• Exemplar Retrieval — Answering by reaching for the closest stored case and reusing its response, rather than applying an abstracted rule — the history itself is the model.
• Identifier — An identifier is a sign or finite symbol sequence used within a declared scope and scheme to distinguish one entity, class, or record from alternatives so references to it can be resolved consistently.
• Identifier Assignment — Mint a durable handle for an entity and bind it to that entity in a public, queryable record, so future reference can route through the handle without re-describing the entity.
• Identity-Providing Kind — A category whose membership fixes what it takes for an instance to remain the same instance over time, supplying persistence criteria rather than a temporary description.
• Metonymy — Referring to a thing via a contiguous element attached to it — part, locale, instrument, institution, address — with the substitution valid only while the contiguity holds.
• Persistent Identifier — A designed token committed to keep resolving to its entity across changes in the entity's location, representation, custodian, or version, via a separately maintained resolver.
• Provenance — A documented, traceable record of an entity's origin and successive custody transfers that establishes authenticity and assigns accountability by linking present state back to first known state.
• Recognition Justice — Judge whether people, identities, experiences, and categories of harm are represented as intelligible and worthy of equal standing before an allocation or procedure is evaluated.
• Record Reconciliation — Matching records across two naming systems and declaring, for each pair, a typed sameness verdict with explicit conditions of preservation and loss.
• Record-Reality Divergence — An authoritative record of an external state drifts from the reality it describes while remaining the basis for downstream decisions.
• Retention Under Removal Uncertainty — A durable system accumulates obsolete-but-not-removable elements because each removal decision faces an asymmetric cost that loses individually and wins only in the integral.
• Retired Term — A label withdrawn from new use but kept resolvable for existing references, with its retired status and successor publicly marked.
• Spaced Repetition — Reinforce over intervals.
• Truncation — Apply a declared boundary to retain an admissible bounded part of an ordered, extended, or over-complete object while discarding the part that lies beyond it.