09 — Provenance, correspondence and fidelity

Document status: draft. Canonical source.

ProvenanceRecord identifies an origin system, source artifact revision and optional source path/range/node/property identity.

CorrespondenceRecord maps NUIF identities/properties to one or more foreign identities/properties and can retain adapter-specific reconstruction hints.

Correspondence is optional canonical-adjacent metadata: it may be stored in a package/profile without changing the semantic document.

Every import/export/lowering returns a FidelityReport with item-level status: lossless, representable, approximated, preserved_unrenderable or unsupported. Diagnostics identify the entity/property and transformation pass responsible.

This mechanism is informed by symmetric and retentive lens research.

Evidence classes

Provenance for capture/reconstruction additionally declares one evidence class:

• authored_source
• resolved_source
• observed_pixels
• inferred
• user_confirmed
• derived
• unavailable

The evidence class and fidelity status answer different questions. Evidence states what was available; fidelity states what was preserved or represented. Confidence states predicted correctness and MUST NOT promote a weaker evidence class to a stronger fidelity claim.

authored_source MAY be lossless only under a declared adapter round-trip profile. resolved_source can be exact for one pinned resolved context without proving authored intent. observed_pixels and inferred MUST NOT be lossless for authored structure, original resources, responsive rules, accessibility or behavior. User confirmation is an additional record and does not erase the original inference history.

A derived record identifies its input digests and exact deterministic or generative transformation. Screenshot crops, traces, inpainting and upscaling are derived resources, never recovered originals.

Confidence and alternatives

Raw provider confidence and calibrated confidence are separate fields. Calibrated confidence identifies a versioned calibration profile and typed correctness event. Whole-document confidence cannot substitute for property- or decision-level confidence.

When evidence is ambiguous, an implementation SHOULD preserve ranked alternatives or abstain. Automatic application MAY be governed by a declared risk/coverage policy; below-threshold values require review or remain unresolved.

Observation identity

An observation records source artifact digest, source region/locator, coordinate space, evaluation context, provider artifact/version, candidate values, evidence class, confidence and privacy/retention class. Coordinate transforms between source pixels, device pixels, viewport pixels, crop-local pixels and NUIF units are explicit.