Agentic Provenance Protocol Specification

Scope

APP defines how provenance information about autonomous activity can be represented and exchanged across independently controlled systems.

Core Objects

Actor · Principal · Authority · Activity · Intent · Action · Observation · Evidence · Policy · Correlation · Execution · Outcome · Verification

Evidence Semantics

Evidence states express whether a claim is verified, asserted, inferred, unresolved, conflicted, stale, revoked or unavailable. See the Evidence Model.

Correlation Semantics

Correlation strength is represented independently from claim state so that related observations are not automatically treated as proven links.

State Evolution

Historical observations remain immutable. Current state evolves as evidence is added, expires, conflicts or is revoked, without erasing earlier protocol history.

Identifiers

Implementations require stable identifiers for activities, observations and evidence so state can be referenced and correlated. These object definitions do not prescribe a canonical wire encoding; implementations must document their identifier and serialisation conventions.

Provenance

Evidence retains its source, observation point, time context and derivation path so a verifier can understand why a claim is supported.

Verification

APP separates an original observation from subsequent independent verification of that observation or the claims derived from it.

Transport Independence

APP does not require one transport. Representations may move through interfaces appropriate to the controlled boundary while preserving protocol semantics.

Versioning

Evidence exchange requires explicit version context. These conceptual definitions do not establish a published version negotiation or compatibility contract.

Conformance

These technical definitions are not a certification programme. No external ratification, published conformance test suite or universal adoption is claimed.