ENTITY Documentation Portal
Protocol semantics

Reality & Evidence

REALITY → OBSERVATION → CLAIM → EVIDENCE → ATTESTATION → VERIFICATION → AUTHORITATIVE ENTITY STATE

ENTITY refuses to collapse these stages. Reality is external. An observation is captured by some process. A claim is a statement about what that observation means. Evidence supports or contradicts the claim. An attestation attributes a statement to an identified authority/witness. Verification evaluates integrity, protocol rules and evidence within their separate scopes.

Three verification boundaries

  1. Cryptographic: are bytes/signatures/hashes intact?
  2. Protocol: do the records satisfy ENTITY's schemas, authority and state-transition rules?
  3. Reality/evidence: does the available evidence justify the external-world conclusion?

A record can be cryptographically valid and protocol-conformant while the underlying external claim is false or disputed.

Contestability

Support contradictory evidence and later conclusions without deleting the earlier signed record. The chain should show what was believed/verified, based on what evidence, and how/why the conclusion changed.