The Registry
The Registry — where a number is issued, an edition is sealed, and everything that happens to it is written down.
The Registry is the authoritative surface of this register: it issues numbers, seals Cards and records events, and its public index is the Book. The Exchange is a second surface, and it reads what the Registry has recorded.
This page says what the Registry is and what it refuses; sets out the history a number carries and what each event on it means; says in which of three ways an entry is carried; and explains the one answer the register gives before a use. The register records; it does not decide.
One register, two surfaces, and only one of them issues.
The Registry issues numbers, seals Cards and records events. The Exchange offers what the Registry has recorded, and holds nothing of its own. The Book is the Registry's public index.
The Registry is the authority for five things, and for nothing else on this site. Every other surface here reads one of them.
- Number
- Ten characters, the sector letter first, issued once and never reused. How a number is built.
- Card
- The human view of what an entry covers and what it refuses. What a Card carries.
- Edition
- One frozen version of a Card. A later edition stands beside the one before it and never erases it.
- Seal
- What a check is recomputed from. Its seal can be checked at tacittessera.com/verify.
- Event
- One line added to a number's history, and never a line taken out of it.
Why the two surfaces are separate. Reading a register and issuing on one are different powers, and a surface that does both ends up ruling on what it has recorded. Splitting them is what lets the Exchange be a buying surface without becoming the authority behind the thing it offers, and what lets the Book be published without publishing the skill sets it indexes. The Exchange reads this surface; the Book is this surface's index; the number, the seal and the history are issued here.
What the Registry refuses. It does not enumerate itself. A search over the public side of the Book and an enumeration of the register are two different things, and only the first exists. There is no list, browse, bulk or export endpoint. It does not carry the skill set: what stands on the public side of an entry is its number, its name, its one status word, its tile and the statement of what it covers. What an entry was made from stays where custody puts it, and the reason is on Trust.
Who this reaches. For the person in the seat, one issuing surface means their skill set has one address, and anybody who wants to check it checks it in the same place. For an OEM's procurement officer, it means the terms read at the Exchange are read off the record a licence is written against, rather than off a copy of it. For counsel, it means the authority for an entry and the market for it can be told apart, which is what lets the record stand as evidence of the thing it records.
Everything the Registry does sits on one chain.
A person's way of working is recorded. The intake runs, and a number issues with a Card, a tile and an edition. The edition is sealed, and its seal can be checked. A licence is taken — execution, learning or derivative — with a term, a field of use and a territory. Before a use, the register answers whether that licence covers this number and this edition. The use happens. A signed row is written, and it is the receipt. The count is the economic record, and what is owed is worked out from it.
The chain is read link by link on the front page, where each link is named and handed to the page that owns it. Three of the nine are the Registry's own work: the entry is written down and numbered; the edition is sealed; and, before a use, the coverage question is answered against the licence on file. Each of the three leaves an event behind it on the number. The rest belong to the source, to the licence, to the machine and to the count, and settlement runs between the parties on their own paper. The register never stands between them.
A number's history only ever grows.
Every number carries an append-only event history. Each line is sealed in a chain whose day's head is anchored, so a line cannot be moved, reordered or quietly dropped without the seal saying so. Nothing is rewritten, and nothing contested is deleted.
These are the events a history may carry, and what each word means when it is written against a number.
| Event | What it records |
|---|---|
| created | The entry exists and has been written down. |
| rights asserted | A named party has stated what rights exist in it and who holds them. |
| intake complete | The rights intake has run and its outcome is on file. |
| issued | The number has issued, with its Card, its tile and its edition. |
| edition sealed | One version is frozen, and its seal can be checked. |
| licensed | A licence has been written against this number at this edition. |
| withdrawal requested | The Source has asked for it to end, under the rule for that licence kind. |
| withdrawal effective | That rule has run, and the date it ran is on the record. |
| challenged | The entry, or a right asserted in it, has been put in question by a named party. |
| frozen | No new licence and no new edition while the matter is open. |
| corrected | An administrative edit, recorded as its own event. Nothing is overwritten. |
| superseded | A later entry stands in its place, and this one stays readable. |
| suspended | No new licence while a matter is open. |
| withdrawn | The Source has ended it, on the rule for that licence kind. |
| retired | Closed or superseded. The number stays reserved forever. |
| common knowledge asserted | A party has asserted that what the entry covers is common knowledge, and the assertion is recorded as an assertion. |
A freeze and a withdrawal take the same shape. It stops for new work at once; a job already underway finishes. That is the rule for an execution licence, and a freeze is that rule applied while a question is open rather than because a Source has ended it. The two withdrawal rules, kind by kind, are on Protect.
A dispute is recorded, not resolved here. It runs through its own states — challenge, freeze, review, resolution, appeal, supersession — and a claim that what an entry covers is already common knowledge is one of the things that can be asserted against it. A challenge is written down and left on the record; who is right is decided where such questions are decided, and this register's record is evidence in it and nothing more.
What the history refuses. A use is not an event on the number. A use produces a usage receipt — one signed row, handed to the licensee and read from both ends — and the count is its own ledger. The public history of a number does not grow every time a machine runs, and Meter says how an hour is counted and by whom it is read. Nothing in a history is a measurement of the person the entry came from: a record is never supplied to assess the person, to an insurer or to anyone else.
Who this reaches. For the person in the seat, the history is the record of what was done with what they gave, and the day they end it is a line in it like any other. For an OEM's procurement officer, it is what makes a licence readable against a date — which edition was current, what was asserted then, and what has happened since. For counsel, append-only with an anchored head is the difference between a record that can be relied on and one that can be tidied.
One word is published, and the rest of a number's life is licensee-side.
The one public status word on this register is Specified.
- Specified Written down and numbered.
Specified is what the register can publish about an entry without saying something it has not tested. A second public word would be a rank, and this register does not rank what it records.
The register keeps two axes and never merges them: the lifecycle of a number, which is licensee-side, and the rights state, which runs recorded → declared → documented. Neither is a rung on the other.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| specified | Written down and numbered. |
| in evaluation | The intake is running. |
| issued | The intake is complete and the number has issued. |
| suspended | No new licence while a matter is open. |
| withdrawn | The Source has ended it, on the rule for that licence kind. |
| retired | Superseded or closed; the number stays reserved forever. |
Verified, validated and cleared are not states on this register. The legend is a glossary of the register's words. It is not a ladder a skill set climbs.
The whole legend belongs to one page: why those three words are named here rather than left out, the rights state word by word, the intake's four outcomes, and why one public word is a ruling rather than an omission, are on Trust. What the register records about rights, and what it declines to decide, is on Rights.
Published, restricted or closed — and none of the three is above another.
An entry is carried in one of three ways: published, where the Book entry is public; restricted, where the entry is public and named fields are held licensee-side by the terms of registration; and closed, where the existence is not published and the entry sits in a private tenant's closed Book entry. These say where an entry is carried, not what a skill set is worth.
Published
The Book entry stands on the public index: the number, the name beside it, the one status word, the tile and the statement of what the entry covers and refuses. It is the default, and it is what makes a number quotable in a specification or a tender.
Restricted
The entry is on the public index, and named fields are held licensee-side because the terms of registration say so — a field a holder cannot publish without giving away the thing the entry exists to license. Which fields are held is itself recorded, so a reader can see that something is held rather than wondering whether it exists.
Closed
The existence of the entry is not published at all. It carries the same number in the same grammar, the same seal, the same event history and the same rights record as any other, and it sits in a private tenant's closed Book entry. Privacy reaches the Book entry and never the number: a number that works only inside one tenant is not a number this register issues. The offering that carries closed entries is a private register, and it is described on Enterprise.
What the three arrangements refuse. They are not tiers. Nothing is upgraded from one to another as a reward, no arrangement reads as better than another, and no customer's name ever stands in front of the bare word. The one public status word is the same word under all three.
What is still open. Where an entry's existence is not disclosed at all, what changes for custody, for a Source carried coded, and for a challenge brought by somebody who cannot see the entry, is a question this register has written down and not answered. It is in front of counsel, and no page states an answer to it until counsel gives one.
Who this reaches. For the person in the seat, the arrangement decides who can see that their entry exists, and it never decides what their entry is worth. For an OEM's procurement officer, it is the difference between a number that can be quoted in a public specification and one that can only be named inside an agreement. For counsel, it is where the terms of registration do their work, because a restricted field is held by a term and not by a promise.
The register answers about the licence, and never about the work.
Before a use, a licensee may ask whether its licence covers this number and this edition. The register answers from the licence, not about the work. The register records; it does not decide.
What is asked. A licensee asks with four things it already holds: the number, the edition it means to run, the licence it holds, and the action it intends — and the actions are named one by one inside the three licence kinds, so the question is about a named thing rather than about a licence in general. License sets out the kinds and the actions under them.
What is answered. Whether that licence covers that number at that edition for that action, and what conditions the licence carries with it — a field of use, a territory, a use kept away, a machine family it was written for. The answer is read off the licence the register recorded and the Card it was written against, and it is recomputed each time rather than stored.
What is never answered. Whether the work is safe. Whether the task is a good idea. Whether a jurisdiction permits it. Who owns anything. Rights policy never asserts safety, and the sentence that says what a licence does and does not do stands on License and on Trust.
Why an answer about a licence is not a verdict about work. The register is reading back a document it recorded. It issues nothing when it answers, it stores nothing as a verdict, and it takes no position on the thing the licensee is about to do. A machine that refuses a job refuses it on its own logic and its own safety case, and the decision to run belongs to the operator and the machine. Coverage is the smallest honest thing a register can say before a use, and this register says that and stops.
Who this reaches. For the person in the seat, it means nothing they gave is ever the thing that says a job is safe to do. For an OEM's procurement officer, it means a rights answer can be wired in front of a run without becoming part of the safety case — and what software asks, and what comes back, is on Developers. For counsel, it means the register's own acts are the ones it answers for: the count, what the count computes, the stop, and the accuracy of the record it reads back.
The register shows what was licensed, and stops there.
An entry can have descendants: a later edition, a Composite that records it as a member, a model a licensee built under a learning or derivative licence. The register records the ancestry a licensee declares, and certifies nothing about it. A declared descendant is a recorded declaration, not a finding.
What the register can show about a derived model is what was licensed for it, and nothing about what the model now contains.
Why the line is drawn there. A licence, a number, an edition and a date are things a register can hold and a second party can check. What a model retains after it has been built is not, in any way a second party can check, and a register that claimed otherwise would be selling a certainty it cannot produce. So the graph is drawn from the paper: what was licensed, to whom, at which edition, under which kind, and what the licensee declared it built. Protect says what that means for the person on the other side of the paper.
Who this reaches. For the person in the seat, it is the reason no page here promises that a model has forgotten them. For an OEM's procurement officer, it is the honest limit of what a licensee can be asked to produce about a system it built — and Enterprise says what that list contains and what caps it. For counsel, a declaration recorded by this register is evidence of what a party stated, on a date, and is not a finding of fact by the register.