Interoperability
Interoperability — what is written to travel, and what the instruments that exist were built for.
A register that nothing else can read is a filing cabinet. This page says which parts of a Card are written so that other systems can carry them, what the register is designed to map to, and — at more length, because it is the part that matters — what the provenance instruments that already exist were actually built for.
Nothing on this page is a claim about another party's system. The register makes no compatibility claim, confers no mark, and names no product, maker or body in either direction.
Designed to map is a statement about this register's own fields, not a claim about anybody else's system.
What it is. The register is designed to map to provenance and machine-readable rights ecosystems: the number and edition, the seal, the rights expression, the context envelope's compatibility fields and the usage receipt are each written to travel. That is a statement about how this register's own fields were chosen — that each one has a form another system could carry without losing what it means.
Why the claim is written that narrowly. Because the wider word is a claim about somebody else's system, and this register has no standing to make one. To say a thing works with another thing is to say that both were tested together and that the second one keeps working. Nobody has tested that, no party has agreed to it, and a register that published the claim anyway would be asserting exactly the kind of unearned status it refuses everywhere else. So the register says what it did: it wrote its fields to travel.
What it records. On the design side, the five things in section 02, each with a form it takes when it leaves. On the register's side, nothing at all: no page carries a list of systems mapped to, no entry carries a mark, and no Card field records that an entry works anywhere in particular.
What it refuses. The wider word — the one that says a thing works with another thing — in every construction it takes. Any designation this register might confer on another party's product. Any statement that an entry is approved for, validated for or passed fit for a machine, a platform, a jurisdiction or a task. And any named product, maker or body, in either direction — neither as an endorsement nor as a criticism.
What is open, and where it goes. Whether a designation of any kind could be offered at all — and whether offering one would make this register the sort of body that confers marks on other people's products, which it does not intend to be — is a question for counsel. It is open, it is with counsel, and until it is answered this page describes mapping and confers nothing.
Five things are written to travel; everything else stays where it is.
The number and the edition. Ten characters, the sector first, and an edition beside them. It is short enough to print on a plate, type into a specification, carry in a field of another system's record, and read out over a radio. It is issued once and never reused, so a system that stores it does not have to know anything about this register in order for the value to keep meaning the same thing in ten years.
The seal. What makes an edition checkable. A system that carries the number and the edition can be told, by a check it runs itself, whether the edition it holds is the edition the register holds. The seal travels as the fact that an edition is sealed and as the address the check is run at; how it is computed stays in the standard.
The rights expression. The permissions a licence grants, in a structure a program can read — the actions allowed and denied, the term, the field of use, the territory, the meter class and the conditions. It is written to travel because a permission that stops at the first integration is not a permission, it is a document. Developers owns it and says what it carries and what it never decides.
The context envelope's compatibility fields. What a skill set was written for — the machine families, the attachments, the environments, the materials and the operating modes. They travel because they are the fields another system has to read in order to know whether an entry is for the work in front of it. Section 03 takes them one at a time.
The usage receipt. The row a use writes: the number, the edition, the licence, the licence kind, the meter class, when, and what was counted. It travels forward with the work, so that what a use produced can be traced to the entry it came from.
What stays behind, and it is most of it. The material a skill set was made from. The licensee-side detail of the envelope. The identity of the person beyond the licence name. The values in the count. The evidence filed at the intake. A Set's members and their shares. None of those is written to travel, and none of them becomes travelable on better terms.
The division is the whole design: an address, a description, a check, a permission and a receipt go out; the knowledge itself does not.
Compatibility is a field group inside the context envelope.
Every Card carries a context envelope: what an entry covers and where it stops, as one object. Inside it sits the group that answers the practical question a buyer asks first — what was this written for? The fields are the machine families, the attachments, the environments, the materials and the operating modes a skill set is written for.
They describe the entry, never another party's product. A field saying that an entry was written for one family of machine in civil earthworks, attended, is a description of what was recorded. It is not an assertion that the entry runs on any particular product, that any maker has agreed to anything, or that anybody has tested the pair. The known exclusions field is written in the same breath as the coverage, because an envelope that says only what a thing covers is an advertisement.
Why a buyer reads it and a maker reads it differently. A buyer reads the envelope to find out whether an entry is for the work in front of them. A maker reads it to find out what would have to be true of their own product for the entry to be worth licensing — and that is the honest shape of the relationship, because the second question is theirs to answer and not this register's. Cards owns the envelope and takes it apart field by field.
What is refused, once more and in this setting. No entry is described as approved for, validated for or passed fit for anything. No coverage is described by how much of something it covers — a coverage description says what a Collection covers in words, never in a count, a bar or a score. And no field in the envelope is a status; the envelope is description, and the register's only public status word is Specified.
A product is rights-aware when it keeps the number, pins the edition, reads the licence, counts the use and honours a withdrawal.
Five things, and each one is a behaviour rather than a property. Keeps the number — the entry's address is stored with whatever the product made from it, and survives the product's own upgrades. Pins the edition — the product knows which frozen version it ran, not merely which entry. Reads the licence — the permissions arrive in a form the product acts on, rather than a document somebody filed. Counts the use — a use writes its row, and the row leaves the product. Honours a withdrawal — when a source ends it, the product stops on the rule for that licence kind: it stops for new work at once; a job already underway finishes.
Why it is written as an adjective and never as a mark. Because the five behaviours are things a product either does or does not do, on any given day, in any given release, and a mark is a thing a product is given once and keeps. This register confers nothing. It has no programme, no list, no badge and no designation to hand out; a maker who builds the five behaviours may describe their own product as rights-aware, and this register will not have tested it, approved it or endorsed it.
What it reaches. For the person in the seat, the fifth behaviour is the one that matters and it is the one most often missing: a stop that reaches the machine. For a procurement officer the five are a specification clause that can be written and tested. For counsel they are the difference between a licence that is administrable and a licence that is a hope.
Scale is where a number reaches work — through a specification, a tender, a maker, a kit company, a fleet or the office software a business already uses — and it names this word once beside each of them.
Each instrument says what it is for, and none of them says what this register is for.
There is a real body of work on provenance and on machine-readable permissions, and it would be dishonest to write this page as though there were not. It would be equally dishonest to imply that any of it covers the thing this register registers. So each instrument is described by what it says about itself, and the limit is quoted from the instrument rather than argued against it. None of them is named here, in either direction, and none of them has said anything about this register.
A vocabulary for expressing preferences about machine use of content. A standards body is drafting one. Its own charter excludes enforcement — the work is to give a publisher a way to state a preference, not to make anyone honour it. A preference that is expressed and not enforced is a useful thing to have and a different thing from a licence.
A rights-reservation protocol. It was finished as a community group report and expressly is not a standard. It reserves; it does not license, does not identify, does not carry a term or a field of use, and does not count anything.
A content-credential specification. It covers the history of a file — what was made, by what, and what happened to it since — and not the right to use it. Its own security analysis concedes that complete removal of the credential is unaddressed. A history that can be stripped is evidence when it survives and nothing when it does not, and the specification says so about itself.
The machine-readable refusal channel. It is honour-based. It has no mechanism behind it, it is addressed to well-behaved readers, and the strongest practical instrument to date has not been the channel at all but a network operator's default — a decision by one party about traffic, which is a fact about infrastructure rather than about rights.
The licensing market that has formed. It has formed between institutions. The individual whose work is in the material is ordinarily a third party to the transaction: not a signatory, not a counterparty, not paid under it and not able to end it. That is not a criticism of anyone's deal. It is a description of a shape, and it is the shape Even Steven exists to prevent.
Read together, the instruments answer four questions well — what was made, what happened to it, what a publisher would prefer, and what two institutions agreed. None of them answers the four this register answers: whose way of working is this, which frozen version of it ran, what exactly may be done with it, and what is owed for the use.
The instruments that exist were built for published works, and none of them was built for a record of a person working.
That is the whole argument of this page, and it is narrower than the one usually made. It is not that provenance is failing, or that the instruments are inadequate, or that some future settlement will arrive. It is that the object is different.
A record of a person working is not a published work. A content-credential specification covers images, video, audio and documents; a synchronised, multi-stream record of a seat is none of those. A location-based refusal channel lives at a website, and a telemetry archive is not served on one, so the channel never reaches it. A data-source category in a training-content template would describe a corpus of that kind in a single line, which is a line and not a record.
And the person is outside every one of them. Each instrument was designed around a publisher, a file or an institution. The party whose way of working is inside the material has no place to stand in any of them: nothing to sign, nothing to end, nothing to be counted for. A provenance apparatus that records everything about a file and nothing about the person the file is of is complete on its own terms and useless for this.
What this register does instead. It gives the way of working an identity that persists, freezes it as an edition, seals the edition so that the version can be checked, records the rights asserted in it and the consents given for it, licenses it in named actions with a term and a field of use, and counts every use so that what is owed can be worked out. The source stays on it: the number sits beside the person's name, never instead of it.
No forecast follows from any of that, and this page carries none. What the instruments become is theirs to decide; what this register is written to do is all that is stated here.
The refusals, named, because a page about other systems is where they are easiest to lose.
Refused
What no sentence on this page means.
- No compatibility claim. The register is designed to map. It is never described as working with, fitting or matching another system.
- No mark conferred. There is no designation, badge, programme or listing this register gives to another party's product, and rights-aware is never one.
- No party named. No maker, platform, publisher, operator or body is named on this page, as an example or as anything else.
- No endorsement, in either direction. Nothing here says that another instrument is good, bad, sufficient or superseded — only what each one says about itself.
- No standard claimed. This register's grammar, Card and seal are its own specification and are not offered as anybody's standard.
- No forecast. No statement about what any of this becomes, on any horizon.
A page that describes other people's work is the easiest place on a site to acquire a claim by accident, which is why the list above is written out rather than assumed.
What remains is a plain position: the fields were written to travel, the behaviours a product needs are named, the instruments that exist are described in their own terms, and the object this register registers is one none of them was built for.