ADR-015: SystemCard protocol with authority and authority version

Status: Accepted (2026-04-20)

Source: migrated from planning/swms-decisions.md ADR-024 as part of SPEC-270.

Context

Both packages/worlds and packages/spectral need to produce system cards — formal audit artifacts that document the subject being evaluated. World model cards document the world model’s rule coverage, provenance, and methodology. Agent performance cards document an agent’s evaluation history, optimization trajectory, and holdout outcomes. These are different documents serving different audiences, but they share structural requirements: a versioned reference to the external standard against which claims are anchored, a metadata envelope, and a multi-audience rendering contract.

Decision

SystemCard Protocol-in-packages/core placement superseded by ADR-065. Per ADR-065 D2 + D4, the system card seam between contexts collapses via event-driven projection: worlds publishes world_model_card_published (typed in worlds.contracts.events.*); platform projects into a local SystemCardSnapshot model and renders from there. There is no SystemCard Protocol shared between contexts. The authority / authority-version convention below carries forward as the field convention applied to event payload shapes and projection-local models.

Two mandatory fields apply to all system card shapes: authority (a reference to the external standard the card’s claims are anchored to) and authority_version (the specific version of that authority).

The authority concept is domain-local to the system card — it does not use world-model-specific language. It expresses the epistemological principle that a system card’s claims must be anchored to an external, independently-established standard; the nature of that standard is determined by the implementing context.

spectral.worlds produces WorldModelCard using the world model itself as authority. spectral.platform produces AgentPerformanceCard using the evaluation framework as authority, whose authority_version traces back to the world model that generated it. System cards are externally generated audit artifacts — not self-reports by the subject.

Multi-audience rendering contract (engineering, leadership, regulatory, end customer renderings) and the metadata envelope shape are realized by each context’s projection / rendering layer independently.

Consequences

• AgentPerformanceCard in spectral.platform carries authority_version that references the world-model version through the evaluation framework’s attribution chain. This makes cross-period comparability explicit.
• Each card shape projects from the producer-typed event payload (per ADR-065 D2) into a context-local model and renders from that projection — no shared Protocol between contexts. The authority / authority-version convention applies uniformly to the event payload shapes and the projection-local models.
• PerformanceCard (Spectral’s internal operational summary of a scan cycle) remains a separate artifact from AgentPerformanceCard (the formal external system card). These serve different audiences and must not be conflated.
• The system card concept supersedes and replaces the prior PerformanceCardBuilderProtocol pattern for external-facing artifacts.
• The authority-basis question (regulatory recognition vs methodology transparency) is resolved in ADR-025. The version-as-unit-of-authority principle is specified in ADR-026.