UCCA — North Star¶

What this is. The second canonical document. FOUNDATION-01 says what the engine is; this says what it is for, pinned as a constraint every build decision must satisfy. It is deliberately short. If a decision cannot be tested against this page, the decision is not ready.

1. The claim¶

The engine is a universal reasoner over regulated obligations. It reasons about whether material meets the requirements of a structured, legislated standard — any domain, any knowledge framework, any jurisdiction. Any regulated obligation can be compiled, by a domain adapter, into one shape — the triumvirate normal form — and the reasoning runs over that normal form and nothing else. The engine's claims are relative to that compilation, whose faithfulness is the compiler's owned, attested judgement: the first raised hand in the chain.

The actor being certified may be a licensed practitioner, an AI agent in a consequential workflow, or the autonomous system that replaces them both. Same schema. Same binary standard. Same audit trail.

The actor changes; the obligation does not.

Honest scope. The universality above holds today for competency standards, and is the claim the engine is built toward for every other obligation. The reasoner presently consumes only the first instrument — the outcomes; the ruleset and evidence-requirement instruments are schema-defined but not yet reasoned over, on either the forward or backward path. An obligation whose rules or evidence specification are load-bearing is not fully reasoned until those instruments reach the reasoner; wiring them is keystone-class, and where unbuilt it bounds the claim to what has actually been reasoned.

2. The throat¶

There is one gate, and it is domain-neutral. It verifies that input conforms to the triumvirate contract — structure, never semantics — and it carries no domain knowledge. Everything domain-specific lives in the adapter, outside the throat, on the client's side of the warranty line.

The gate must be able to ingest all. Any narrowing of the throat — any check, field, or assumption that exists because of what one client's domain happens to be — is drift, and drift is caught by one question asked of every build decision:

"Does this only work because the client is VET?" If yes, it moves to the adapter. The gate does not narrow.

This is ratified and enforced as ADR-0002. This page is why that ADR exists.

3. The first meal¶

RTOpacks is the engine's first client. It is the first meal, not the shape. Its requirements enter as a client's requirements, authored on its own side of the fence (FOUNDATION-01 §3; FENCE-PROTOCOL-01), across a commercial and corporate boundary that is also the trust and warranty boundary (ADR-0003). The engine is funded by its first client and shaped by none.

4. The standard's opening voice¶

Pinned verbatim (Tim, 2026-07-01), as the voice the UCCO standard opens in:

"Any domain. Any knowledge framework. Any jurisdiction. The ingestion engine processes source material through a validated capability schema and outputs binary-verifiable capability objects. Immutable. Cryptographically anchored. API-addressable. The same infrastructure that verifies a licensed practitioner verifies an AI agent operating in a consequential workflow — and the autonomous system that replaces them both. Same schema. Same binary standard. Same audit trail. The actor changes. The obligation does not. The robot does not act until the capability object says it can be trusted to. In the absence of that object, trust is assumed — and assumed trust in autonomous systems is a liability that will eventually be priced. In fines. In failures. In prison."

5. What this constrains¶

Every build decision answers the drift-check before it ships. Nothing enters canon that narrows the throat. The engine raises hands and never signs (FOUNDATION-01 §2) — universality never becomes authority over the human judgement it serves. And the reasoner's generality is the property being protected: the engine is worth more than any product built on it precisely as long as this page stays true.

6. The declared claim¶

Every claim the engine makes is qualified, and the qualification is declared — never hidden. A coverage claim carries: - its basis — a byte-verified verbatim anchor, a declared inference (domain reasoning, never presented as a literal match), not-yet (no basis in the provided material), or ungrounded (no basis to reason about the named referent at all); - its scope — relative to the compiled leaf-set; where an obligation's enumeration is open, a complete walk covers the enumerated content only, and says so; - its temporal character — a point-in-time trace, or a continuous state that decays by its own nature (so expiry is intrinsic, not optional, for a whole class of obligations).

The engine never upgrades an inference into a verbatim trace, and never invents a referent. How strict a basis must be to count as coverage is a client-set, per-domain policy held in the adapter — strict-literal domains (defence, nuclear, medical) receive an inference only as a raised hand for human confirmation; the throat stays neutral (ADR-0002). And the engine that certifies others continuously re-certifies itself, and proves on the record that it is current.

Declaring the basis of a claim is how the raised hand stays honest (FOUNDATION-01 §2). Universality never becomes authority over the human judgement it serves.

What a TRACED finding claims. TRACED asserts exactly this: in the submitted material there is a byte-verified verbatim anchor that is responsive to this element of the compiled obligation, on the claim's declared basis, relative to the compilation and its enumerated leaf-set — and nothing more. Its exclusions are standing and named: contextual, definitional and purposive material is not resolved; material elsewhere in the submission that may qualify or defeat the anchored passage is not checked; operational reality is not observed; the truth of the material is not attested. TRACED never asserts that the obligation is met, satisfied or complied with, in whole or in part — satisfaction is the accountable human judgement the engine never performs (FOUNDATION-01 §2).

What a NOT_YET_TRACED finding claims. No such anchor was found in the submitted material. It is an honest gap in the trace — never a finding of failure, deficiency or non-compliance.

Second stone. The claim: a universal reasoner, one neutral throat, a first client that is a meal and not a mould, and a standard whose subject is the obligation — never the actor. Every decision that cannot pass this page waits until it can.

Amendment record. v1.0 ratified 2026-07-02. v1.1 ratified 2026-07-24 (Class G, Tim) — coordinated pass cutting the second stone once: §1 restated to the compiled-normal-form reading with an honest-scope line naming the unconsumed instruments (from UCCA-TRIUMVIRATE-UNIVERSALITY-TEST-01); new §6 "The declared claim" stating basis + scope + temporal + client-set strictness + self-currency as one principle (from UCCA-CAPTURE-HONESTY-GRAMMAR-AND-BENCHMARK-2026-07-24). Absorbs A27 (compilation faithfulness = compiler-asserted, surfaced in the UCCO assertion-scope) and A29 (continuous obligations → intrinsic expiry). Ruling UCCA-AMENDMENT-NORTHSTAR-HONESTY-2026-07-24.

v1.2 ratified 2026-07-26 (Class G, Tim) — §6 completed with the claim's content: a TRACED finding asserts anchored responsiveness with named exclusions, never satisfaction; a NOT_YET_TRACED finding asserts an honest gap, never non-compliance. Ratifies the 2026-07-19 scoping (UCCA-TRIUMVIRATE-UNIVERSALITY-TEST-01), externally blind-corroborated 4/4 volunteered (UCCA-SYNTHESIS-INTERPRETIVE-DOCTRINE-2026-07-26 §3.1). Discharges the standing landmine that ADR-0002 alone cannot answer the verdict-neutrality objection — the semantics now does. Ruling UCCA-AMENDMENT-NORTHSTAR-TRACED-SEMANTICS-2026-07-26.