Sense, make sense, decide, authorize, act, assess
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01
Sense
Distributed sources produce observations, health state, confidence, time, and provenance.
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02
Make sense
Edge and fusion services correlate evidence, preserve competing hypotheses, and mark age and uncertainty.
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03
Compose options
Capability registries and orchestration services screen compatible pathways against reachability, capacity, quality, timing, and dependencies.
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04
Apply trust and policy
Identity, classification, releasability, safety, legal, and command constraints exclude invalid options.
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05
Authorize and act
The responsible authority selects or rejects a bounded option; execution remains within the approved task and constraints.
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06
Assess and update
Outcome evidence returns to the data fabric, changes confidence and availability, and may trigger another cycle.
Capabilities must be machine-readable
The network cannot compose useful paths if it knows only platform names. It needs bounded capability descriptions: what function is offered, what input is required, what output is produced, when and where it is available, what dependencies it has, and which authority owns it.
Sensitive implementation details can remain abstracted. A consumer needs enough information to judge fitness without receiving unnecessary sources-and-methods data.
- Identity and owning authority
- Function, inputs, outputs, and semantic version
- Availability, capacity, health, and state age
- Quality, confidence, and communications dependencies
- Classification, releasability, and policy constraints
- Opportunity cost and conflicts with other commitments
Recomposition is a controlled state change
When a node fails, the architecture should not blindly route around it. It must first detect the loss or loss of trust, update the graph, reject stale reservations, discover alternatives, reapply policy, and communicate the changed path to responsible operators.
The safest alternate may be slower, lower fidelity, or restricted to continued sensing rather than action. Graceful degradation means preserving a safe reduced function, not pretending the original mission remains unchanged.
Assessment closes the web
Assessment is not an afterthought. It verifies whether the intended effect occurred, detects unintended consequences, updates data quality, and reveals whether the selected path actually performed as expected.
Without a trustworthy feedback path, the web can optimize activity while losing sight of mission outcome.
Research basis: KW-RPT-002, KW-RPT-009, and KW-RPT-013.