A Kristal is designed to be trusted without asking you to trust a platform.
It is not “true because a website says so.” It is verifiable because it carries its origin, its evidence trail, and its publication authority in a form that can be checked—including offline.
What “provenance” means here
Provenance answers:
Where did this claim come from?
Who published it?
What evidence was used?
What rules were applied to compile it?
What changed since the previous version?
A Kristal is useful only if it makes those questions cheap to answer.
What you can verify (without trusting the host)
When you receive a Kristal, you should be able to verify:
Identity: which artifact it is (stable identifier)
Publisher: which authority signed it (person, institution, collective)
Integrity: that the content has not been altered
Lineage: what prior version(s) it descends from
Evidence trail: references or source anchors used to compile it
Policy / scope: what domain it covers and what it does not claim
This is the baseline: auditability by default, not optional transparency.
Trust is not one global score
kOA does not assume one universal “truth authority.”
Instead, trust is domain-bounded and policy-driven:
A health Kristal and a municipal budget Kristal do not need the same validators.
Different communities can adopt different trust policies.
The system’s job is to make trust choices explicit and inspectable.
Authority channels (how communities decide what to trust)
Think of an authority channel as a curated “trust list” + rules:
which publishers are recognized for a domain,
what standards they must meet,
how conflicts are handled,
and what recourse exists when something is wrong.
This prevents invisible gatekeeping: the criteria are written down, and the channel itself can be governed.
Federation (how multiple sources coexist)
Kristals can be composed across domains and publishers without pretending disagreements don’t exist.
Federation means:
a system can present a unified experience (search, navigation, summaries),
while still preserving who said what, under which rules,
and allowing multiple competing Kristals to coexist when reality is contested.
The point is to avoid “silent merging” that hides value choices.
Contestability & correction
A trustable system must support:
challenge: flagging a claim, a source, or a compilation rule
correction: publishing a revised version with explicit diffs
recourse: a clear path for dispute resolution (institutional or community-based)
exit: the ability to leave a channel/publisher and adopt another policy without losing your data
Kristals are built to make disagreement legible—not to erase it.
Practical mental model
Provenance tells you: “This is what this artifact asserts, and here is why.”
Authority tells you: “These are the publishers I’m choosing to rely on for this domain.”
Federation tells you: “Here are multiple views, kept separate, with clear attribution.”
