TL;DR
- 01DIALECTICA partitions state across seven graphs because different parts of the system have incompatible mutability contracts.
- 02Base + Evidence are immutable (the audit trail). Analytical is append-only at transaction-time. Narrative is drift-tolerant. Commitment carries bi-temporal status. Case is forkable per dossier. Scenario is counterfactual and never merged back without explicit promotion.
- 03A unified graph satisfying all three contracts satisfies none of them well. The partition is the engineering thesis.
Different parts of the system have incompatible mutability contracts. A single graph satisfying all of them satisfies none of them well. Here is why we partition — and why the partition is the engineering thesis.
The seven graphs
- ▸Base — raw ingested facts. Append-only. Immutable.
- ▸Evidence — source spans + citations. Immutable, cryptographically bound to Base.
- ▸Analytical — typed primitive instances + edges (the working ACO subgraph). Bi-temporal; revisions logged as new edges with new
t_tx; invalidation, not deletion. - ▸Narrative — framings + drift chains. Drift-tolerant; all framings preserved.
- ▸Commitment — bi-temporal commitment register with status transitions.
- ▸Case — practitioner-facing forkable subgraph for a particular dossier.
- ▸Scenario — counterfactual / prospective subgraphs for options analysis; isolated; never merged back without explicit promotion.
Four reasoning layers above
- ▸GND (Grounded) — point-in-time queries against Base + Evidence: "what does the source corpus say, character-exact?"
- ▸CTX (Context) — typed queries against Analytical + Narrative + Commitment: "what is the structure of the case?"
- ▸EVD (Evidence) — provenance traversal: "for this claim, what is the chain of source spans, derivations, and revisions?"
- ▸RZN (Reasoning) — the LLM is brought back in, constrained by the typed graph as a hard scaffold rather than a soft retrieval source.
Why this matters institutionally
Auditability and editability cannot be the same property; they have to live in different shapes. Conflict work demands both at once. The seven-graph architecture is the smallest design we have found that gives both shapes a place to live without compromising either.
SOURCES
