ADR-015: SystemCard protocol with authority and authority version

Context

Both spectral.worlds and spectral.platform 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

The SystemCard seam between contexts follows ADR-065’s event-driven projection / contract-surface model (D2 + D4): 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 is 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. System cards are externally generated audit artifacts — not self-reports by the subject.

The platform-side card is the deployment-scoped System Card documenting the deployed decision-module instance (operational record + methodology disclosure + version history), per ADR-082.

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

• The platform-side card is the deployment-scoped System Card; its authority anchor is the deployed module’s content hash per ADR-080 D1, with authority_version carrying the world-model version pinned to the module.
• 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.
• 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.