ucwm/docs/vocabulary.md

UCWM Vocabulary

Core terms

UCWM — Unified Constraint World Model The whole structured reasoning substrate. Converts messy natural language into a typed world state of objects, facets, and constraints, then resolves that state to produce answers.

RSA — Relay Specialist Architecture The routing and dispatch mechanism inside UCWM. RSA decides which specialists run, on which objects, with what budget. RSA is not the model core; UCWM is.

CanonicalObject The primary reusable referent. A stable anchor that facets attach to. Objects are not overloaded — they carry identity, kind, status, confidence, and refs to facets, constraints, and provenance.

FacetBundle The collection of typed descriptions attached to a single canonical object. A single object may have temporal, causal, spatial, logical, and other facets simultaneously.

Facet A partial, typed view of a canonical object. Examples: TemporalFacet, SpatialFacet, CausalFacet, QuantityFacet. Facets are optional — not every object exists in every relation type.

Schema Plurality The principle that the same underlying thing may be validly described by multiple schema systems simultaneously. UCWM does not force a single schema early. Specialists attach schema-shaped facets; the resolver reconciles.

Constraint An explicit relation, restriction, incompatibility, requirement, or preference involving objects and/or facets. Constraints are the core reasoning currency. Examples: before(E1, E2), owns(Alice, apples, count=5), quantity(Q1) = quantity(Q2) - 3.

Constraint Profile The active set of constraints touching a given object and its facets.

Composite Routing A relay decision that activates multiple specialists on the same target simultaneously.

Relation Gate Array The front-end set of small recognizers that detect which relation families are probably relevant to the input. High-recall by design — prefer false activation over missed activation.

GateSignal The output of a single gate. Contains: gate_id, activated flag, confidence score, and evidence spans.

RoutingDecision The output of the relay. Contains: active specialists, target object refs, execution mode, budget, and priority order.

WorldState The active UCWM state at a given processing stage. Contains all current objects, facets, constraints, and their statuses.

Contractual Layer A module boundary with typed input/output schemas and testable behavior. Every UCWM layer is a contractual layer.

Specialist A contract-bound module that takes canonical objects and routing context, and emits typed facets and constraints. May be neural, symbolic, statistical, or hybrid. Emits bounded structured output — never unconstrained free text.

Resolver The UCWM component that combines constraints from specialists, detects contradictions, reinforces agreements, and stabilizes WorldState into a resolved form ready for synthesis.

Synthesis The final stage. Produces a natural language answer and derivation trace from resolved WorldState. The answer must be derivable from constraints, not from surface token patterns.

Provenance A record of where a fact, object, facet, or constraint came from: which input span, which module, which inference step, at what confidence.

Constraint strength levels

Strength	Meaning
hard	Must hold; contradiction is an error
soft	Preferred; can be overridden by hard constraints
probabilistic	Holds with a stated probability
defeasible	Default assumption; can be retracted by new evidence

Constraint status lifecycle

unresolved → resolved
           → contradicted
           → suspended

Object kinds

entity, event, concept, proposition, relation_instance, procedure_step, code_object, quantity, claim, state

Object status lifecycle

proposed → active → merged
                  → split
                  → invalidated

Facet kinds

temporal, spatial, causal, logical, syntactic, semantic, social, ownership, code_structure, quantity, planning