Individuation Criteria Charter¶
Document — instantiates Entity Individuation Criteria Design
The single authoritative document that declares, for a scope, which entity kinds exist, their unity and identity tests, and who may revise them.
Once a system has decided what counts as one entity, someone has to be able to point to the authoritative statement of that decision — otherwise the rule lives only in tribal memory and drifts with each new hire. Individuation Criteria Charter is that statement: the governing document that, for a defined scope, sets out the entity kinds, their unity and identity criteria, and — decisively — the authority for who may interpret and revise them. It is the constitution of the entity model. Its defining feature is that it speaks in the present tense of what the rules are and who owns them: it is the current source of truth, the thing every other mechanism cites. It does not record how the rules got here or migrate old data (that is the rulebook's job) — it declares the rules now in force and vests the authority to change them.
Example¶
A hospital network establishes a charter for how it individuates people across care, billing, and research. In one authoritative document it fixes the scope (this charter governs the clinical and billing systems, explicitly not the research de-identified warehouse, which individuates differently). It names the entity kinds and separates them from roles: natural person and account are identity-providing kinds; patient, guarantor, and guardian are roles a person can hold. It states the unity criterion (an encounter and its associated orders compose one episode of care) and the identity criterion (two person-presentations are the same only on a verified identifier plus corroborating demographics). And it names authority: the Master Data Governance Council interprets the criteria, a two-thirds vote revises them, and the chief data officer signs.
When a downstream team asks "is a stillbirth registered as a person here?" the answer is not an argument — it is a clause in the charter, and if the charter is silent, the charter also says who decides. Every other mechanism — the resolution policy, the registry, the checklist — points back to this one document for its rules.
How it works¶
- Declare the scope up front. State exactly where the criteria apply and where they explicitly do not, so no one misapplies one context's rule as universal.
- Catalog kinds, separate roles. List the identity-providing entity kinds and mark the roles, states, and labels that are not entities, preventing the common conflation of a role with a person.
- State the tests plainly. Give the unity and identity criteria in language a non-specialist reviewer can apply, since the charter's value is that people can read the rule.
- Vest authority explicitly. Name who interprets, who revises, by what threshold, and who signs — so a disputed rule has an owner, not a vacuum.
Tuning parameters¶
- Scope breadth — one charter per narrow context versus one broad charter for many. Broad charters buy consistency but strain when contexts genuinely individuate differently.
- Prescriptiveness — bright-line tests versus principles. Bright lines are enforceable but brittle at the edges; principles flex but push more work onto adjudication.
- Revision threshold — how hard the criteria are to change (simple sign-off to supermajority). Higher thresholds protect stability but slow legitimate correction.
- Readership register — written for lawyers, for engineers, or for operators. The audience it is legible to is the audience that will actually apply it.
When it helps, and when it misleads¶
Its strength is authoritative singularity: it gives an entity model one place to stand and one owner to answer to, which is the antidote to rules that drift because no document holds them. It is what lets every sibling mechanism cite a shared, revisable source rather than improvising.
Its failure mode is that a charter records stipulative definitions — it settles by decree what a term shall mean — and a decree can be tidy and still wrong, or precise and still contested by those it binds.[n1] A charter also silently ages: because it speaks only in the present tense, entities defined under a superseded version become uninterpretable unless a separate history is kept. The guarding discipline is to treat the charter as a living instrument with a named revision authority and a real appeal path, and to pair it with a version history for migration — the charter says what the rules are, and must not pretend it is also the record of what they were.
How it implements the components¶
individuation_scope_boundary— its opening clause fixes where the criteria apply and where they do not.entity_kind_catalog— it lists the identity-providing kinds and separates them from roles and states.unity_criterion— it states, in applicable language, what composes one whole.identity_criterion— it states the same-as warrant every downstream policy cites.authority_and_revision_protocol— it names who interprets, revises, and signs, vesting governance in a body rather than in custom.
It does not carry the persistence_through_change_rule, split_merge_and_succession_rule, or cross_context_identity_crosswalk — those version-history and migration provisions live in its hazard-twin, the Versioned Identity Rulebook; the charter declares the rules now in force, the rulebook records their succession over time.
Related¶
- Instantiates: Entity Individuation Criteria Design — the authoritative source document the whole scheme cites.
- Consumes: Entity Definition Workshop — the discovery session whose drafted kinds and unity rule the charter ratifies.
- Sibling mechanisms: Versioned Identity Rulebook · Entity Definition Workshop · Identity and Unity Test Checklist · Entity Resolution Policy · Edge-Case Adjudication Panel · Master Entity Registry · Split/Merge Decision Tree · Count Impact Assessment
Editorial Notes¶
Form Classification¶
Form family: Rule, Policy & Commitment
Rationale: Individuation Criteria Charter operates as a standing rule, threshold, contractual commitment, or policy constraint governing future conduct because it the single authoritative document that declares, for a scope, which entity kinds exist, their unity and identity tests, and who may revise them
Independent corroboration: The frozen evidence defines Individuation Criteria Charter as 'The single authoritative document that declares, for a scope, which entity kinds exist, their unity and identity tests, and who may revise them', so its operative form is Rule, Policy & Commitment.
Review outcome: Independent reviewer agreement; medium confidence.
Origin Attribution¶
Primary origin: Philosophy
Origin pattern: Cross-disciplinary synthesis
Present-day reach: Universal
Rationale: Criteria for entity unity, persistence, and identity originate in metaphysics and philosophical ontology.
Related originating lineages:
- Law & Governance — Authoritative stipulation, revision authority, and appeal give the criteria their charter-like institutional form.
- Library & Information Science — Controlled vocabularies and authoritative classification governance materially shape the charter artifact and revision authority.
Review resolution: Both independent reviews place the primary lineage in philosophy. The queued differences (alternate_origin_disagreement) concern secondary metadata rather than primary provenance. The final retains library_information_science, law_governance only where a reviewer supplied a formative-lineage rationale; this does not convert downstream applicability into origin. origin_mode=cross_disciplinary_synthesis because the entry's present form deliberately composes methods from the documented lineages. domain_reach=universal records application breadth separately from provenance.
Encyclopedia synthesis: The exact catalogued form synthesizes established practice rather than reproducing a single standard historical label.
Review outcome: Reconciled after independent review; high confidence.
Notes¶
The charter and the Versioned Identity Rulebook are easy to conflate because both are documents about the criteria. The clean split: the charter is the present constitution — what the rules are and who owns them; the rulebook is the version-control ledger — the history of those rules and how to migrate entities defined under old ones. Keep authority in the charter and versioning in the rulebook, and neither has to duplicate the other.
[n1] A stipulative definition assigns a meaning to a term by decree for a given purpose, rather than reporting existing usage. Charters are stipulative by nature — their strength (they settle the question) is also their risk (a stipulation can be internally neat yet mismatched to the domain or disputed by those it governs), which is why the revision authority and appeal path matter as much as the definitions themselves. ↩