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Source-of-Truth Registry

Authority register — instantiates Data Integrity Preservation

Documents, per field or claim, which system or role is authoritative — the reference that integrity checks and reconciliation consult to know which value should win.

Source-of-Truth Registry is the lookup that tells the rest of the integrity machinery which copy to trust. When the same fact lives in several systems, an integrity check or a reconciliation run needs a defensible answer to "if these disagree, which one is right for this field?" — and this registry documents exactly that: for each class of claim or field, the system, role, record, or process that is authoritative, together with how current and how tiered that authority is. Its distinguishing job is to be the standing reference on authority that integrity work consults, not to choose that authority as a governance act. It turns "we have this value in five places" into "for reconciliation, the ERP governs weight, the PLM governs dimensions" — the map that lets discrepancy handling resolve toward the right source instead of guessing.

Example

A manufacturer carries product-master data across a PLM system (engineering), an ERP (finance and supply chain), and an e-commerce catalog. The same product has a weight, a price, a set of dimensions, and a description — but each field is maintained accurately in a different place, and the systems routinely drift. The registry records, field by field, the authoritative source: dimensions and materials are authoritative in PLM, price and cost in ERP, marketing description in the catalog, each with a note on how fresh it must be. When nightly reconciliation finds a product whose weight differs between PLM and ERP, it consults the registry, sees PLM governs weight, and corrects the ERP copy toward PLM — automatically and consistently, instead of an analyst adjudicating case by case. The registry does not decide PLM should own weight; it documents that authority so every integrity check applies it the same way.

How it works

The registry is a governed reference table: a keyed list mapping each field or claim to its authoritative source, read by many integrity processes and written by few. Distinctively, its unit is the field-level authority relation — not "this system is the master" wholesale, but "for this field, this source governs" — and it tiers those relations by how much authority tracking a data class actually warrants (a regulated financial field is registered and policed tightly; a low-stakes attribute loosely or not at all). It is consulted, not enforced: reconciliation, monitoring, and validation read it to know which value should win, while the registry itself only records the relation and how current it is expected to be.

Tuning parameters

  • Registration granularity — authority declared per system, per entity, or per field. Field-level authority matches reality (few systems govern everything about an entity) but multiplies entries to maintain.
  • Scope tiering — how many data classes are actively registered and policed versus left informal. Tiering concentrates the maintenance burden on the fields where trusting the wrong copy would cost most.
  • Freshness expectation — whether each authority relation carries a currency requirement (how up to date the authoritative source must be) so a stale "authority" is not blindly trusted.
  • Maintenance discipline — how the registry is kept in step with the real architecture. A registry that drifts from reality is worse than none, because integrity checks trust it.

When it helps, and when it misleads

Its strength is giving every integrity process a single, consistent answer to "which value wins," so reconciliation and validation resolve disagreements the same way regardless of who is on shift — no more picking the convenient copy. It is what lets discrepancy repair be automatic and defensible rather than a series of one-off judgement calls. Its central danger is drift: because integrity mechanisms trust the registry, a registry that has fallen out of step with the real systems will confidently point repairs at the wrong source, propagating error under the banner of authority.[1] The classic misuse is naming a convenient or most-visible system as authoritative for a field it does not actually maintain, so the registry blesses a lagging copy. The discipline that guards against this is registering authority where the fact is genuinely created and corrected (not merely read), attaching a freshness expectation to each relation, and reviewing the registry as the architecture changes.

How it implements the components

  • authoritative_state_relation — its core output: the documented, field-level mapping of which system, role, or record is authoritative for each claim, so integrity checks know which representation to trust.
  • integrity_scope_tier — it tiers those relations by how much authority tracking each data class warrants, concentrating maintenance where trusting the wrong copy is costliest.

It does not compare and repair the discrepancies that appeal to it (that is Reconciliation Workflow), enforce links between records (that is Referential Integrity Constraint), or record the history of changes to authoritative values (that is Audit Log).

  • Instantiates: Data Integrity Preservation — it supplies the authority reference that lets integrity checks and repairs resolve toward the trusted source.
  • Sibling mechanisms: Reconciliation Workflow · Referential Integrity Constraint · Integrity Anomaly Monitoring · Data Validation Schema · Checksum or Hash Validation · Transactional Write Control · Access Control Enforcement · Audit Log · Data Lineage Capture · Backup and Restore Verification

Notes

Do not confuse this with the neighboring Source-of-Truth Assignment archetype. There, mechanisms such as System-of-Record Designation perform the governance act of choosing which system holds authority and building the machinery to make it real. Here, the registry is a descriptive reference within integrity preservation — it documents an authority relation so reconciliation and monitoring can consult it. One decides authority; this one records it for integrity work to use. When the choosing itself is the task, that belongs to the neighbor.

References

[1] A registry of authoritative sources is a form of metadata catalog — descriptive, not enforcing. Its value depends entirely on staying synchronized with the systems it describes: integrity mechanisms act on what the catalog says, so a stale entry silently redirects trust to the wrong place. ↩