Runtime layers, authorities and state
Documentation status: guide. This describes implementation responsibilities, not new declarative syntax.
Five distinct authorities
| Authority | What it governs | Do not confuse with |
|---|---|---|
| MODEL | Physical YAML/XML declarations, grammar, source-aware DOM and local edits | Assembled application metadata |
| APPLICATION | Resolved packages, inheritance/redefinitions, activated metadata and object model | Source-file fidelity |
| SEMANTIC | H-Logic and compiled Hypergraph concepts, relations, identities and proofs | Runtime execution sessions |
| RUNTIME | Executing contexts, services, transactions, operationalizations and providers | Persisted business definitions |
| NUMERICAL | Embeddings, tensors, similarity indexes and device-resident buffers | Authoritative logical facts |
A MODEL edit may trigger compilation and semantic invalidation, but these are different operations with different lifecycles. An approximate index or neural score never becomes the authority for a logical relation simply because it is fast to query.
Three practical state lifetimes
Configuration/model state survives many actions (loaded packages, service configuration, graph structures, model weights). Session state survives calls in one activity (cursor, execution context, remote channel instance, KV cache). Operation-local state is released after a query, action, parse or inference step. Decide which lifetime applies before caching, sharing or freeing an object.
Choose the smallest relevant layer
- Changing model declarations? Work at MODEL and validate before activation.
- Performing domain actions? Resolve APPLICATION metadata and runtime objects.
- Asking a conceptual question? Use SEMANTIC via H-Logic / Hypergraph.
- Hosting long-running work? Use services and communication.
- Scoring candidates or decoding tokens? Keep NUMERICAL projections separate from semantic commitments.
For graph construction, choose operations explicitly exposed by the versioned Hypergraph ABI or the documented H-Logic parser. Internal implementation methods are not part of the public contract.
LaTeX sources: runtime-overview.tex; runtime-layer-map-and-programming-paths.tex; neuro-symbolic guide chapters/authority-layers-and-representations.tex.