Successor semantic baseline
Preserve behaviour-first intent while rebuilding behind Modeller-owned meaning.
Status: Accepted
Source: Wayfinder issue #13
Canonical terms
Behaviour · Canonical trace · Conclusion · Decision · Effect · Entity · Evidence · Event · Explanation · Fact · Guard · Invariant · Lifecycle · Rule · State · Transition · Workflow
Decision
The successor preserves Modeller's behaviour-first destination and the useful decision capabilities found in the legacy rules prototype. It does not transplant the legacy executable model or runtime. Those capabilities will be rebuilt behind a canonical semantic model owned by Modeller.
The following relationships constrain later decisions:
- Behaviour is the organising principle.
- Entities provide identity, lifecycle, and state.
- Rules evaluate typed facts and produce explained conclusions.
- Behaviours own effects, transitions, and event publication.
- Persistence remains a separate concern.
- Diagrams project the authoritative semantic model; layout is never semantic truth.
- External rule formats and runtimes are adapters.
Consequences
The existing entity- and endpoint-centred model is evidence, not the successor design. Participants, behaviours, rules, guards, invariants, effects, transitions, workflows, and diagram projections must become integrated semantic concepts before implementation begins.
Legacy decision tables, graph evaluation, hit policies, canonical traces, explanations, and editing concepts may be adapted. Object-typed facts and results, shared per-evaluation state, incomplete cancellation, hard-coded validation, unstructured statuses, mixed semantic/layout state, and ambiguous expression ownership must not be carried forward as architectural defaults.