Focus Area: Agent-to-agent compliance obligations, policy conformance, auditability, and rule-enforcement workflows governing autonomous interactions and transactions.
This ontology provides citation-quality definitions for 15 foundational terms, backed by authoritative sources from standards bodies (NIST, W3C, IETF, OASIS, ISO) and peer-reviewed research.
Technical Glossary
A signed machine-readable statement of the policies, controls, and obligations that govern an autonomous interaction. It gives compliance meaning before execution begins.
A record that connects abstract rules to concrete duties for each participating agent, service, or principal. Mapping is how compliance moves from generic policy text into role-specific execution.
A runtime indication that a required control has been checked and passed, failed, or deferred. It allows dependent systems to respond to compliance state instead of guessing it.
A narrowly scoped authorization artifact that allows a controlled deviation from the normal rule set under recorded conditions. Exception tokens exist so systems can remain governable without becoming rigid.
A linked series of logs, signatures, credentials, and control outputs proving what was checked and what happened. The chain is central because auditability is a first-class compliance requirement.
A structured statement that a required condition, threshold, or prohibition has been breached by an autonomous actor or workflow. It converts a local control failure into a shareable governance event.
An instruction describing the corrective actions needed to restore compliance after a detected issue. Orders matter because compliant operation often depends on sequenced recovery, not just detection.
A compliance verification step performed by a separate service or agent acting under bounded authority. Delegation is useful when the enforcing actor is not the same as the transacting actor.
A continuously updated record showing whether evidence, controls, and procedural artifacts are currently sufficient for internal or external review. It lets systems know if they are governable in the present, not just after the fact.
The signed result of a policy evaluation that states whether a proposed or completed action met the applicable requirements. This record is the machine-readable answer to the question, was this allowed?
The attachment of data retention, deletion, or evidentiary preservation rules to a specific transaction or compliance artifact. It prevents compliance records from being kept too briefly or too broadly.
A signal that compliance issues have crossed a severity, persistence, or jurisdiction threshold requiring higher-level review. Escalation triggers stop serious failures from remaining trapped inside local automation.
The conversion of a rule or obligation into an equivalent form that can be understood and enforced by another system. Translation is essential because autonomous ecosystems rarely share one policy language.
A recurring check that measures whether an agent or workflow remains inside the rule envelope over time. It treats compliance as an ongoing posture, not a one-time gate.
A signed result indicating that a compliance review, control check, or remediation cycle has concluded with a specific status. Attestation makes the compliance state portable to relying systems.