{"slug":"canonical/adr/ADR-2026-09-04-05-business-context-spine-fabric","title":"ADR-2026-09-04-05 — Business Context is the center; Spine Fabric is the substrate","section":"canonical","sectionLabel":"Canon","status":"canon","type":"adr","path":"canonical/adr/ADR-2026-09-04-05-business-context-spine-fabric.md","bytes":2159,"description":null,"updated":null,"source":"integratewise/Integratewise-docs-wiki","content":"\n**Status:** ACCEPTED — 2026-09-04 (founder decisions; TIER-0 in the in-tree canon)\n\n## Context\n\nOrganizations do not run inside one tool; business meaning is distributed across CRM, ERP,\nsupport, email, chat, files, projects, finance, databases and AI systems. Tools-first or\nmodel-first designs repeat the fragmentation at machine speed. The Spine had also been described\ninconsistently as \"a database,\" an ESB, or a per-role schema.\n\n## Decision\n\n- **Business Context is the core product concern** and the top-level model: Mission → Objectives\n  → Goals → KPIs → Initiatives → Work → Decisions → Actions → Outcomes → Learning link back\n  through the Spine.\n- The **Business Contextual Spine Fabric** is the tenant-scoped governed canonical context\n  network: *tools connect once, governed context becomes reusable.* It preserves semantic and\n  temporal context (work, decisions, evidence, authority, outcomes over time) — which a\n  transport bus does not.\n- The Spine is a **logical contract**, not a vendor database: physical storage (D1, Postgres/Neon,\n  KV, R2, vector, queues) is a deployment ADR beneath the logical contract and must not redefine\n  product semantics.\n- Continuity derives from four primitives: **Event, Entity, Relationship, Synthesis**.\n- Effective Spine is the mandatory Base Spine plus additive expansions only (department, industry,\n  role, connector, tenant, contextual). No expansion may remove tenancy, provenance, authority,\n  evidence, lifecycle, sync or reconciliation contracts.\n\n## Alternatives considered\n\n- Per-role or per-department databases — rejected: creates N copies of truth.\n- An ESB/message-bus framing — rejected: transports messages but does not preserve context,\n  continuity, evidence or authority.\n- A single physical store as canonical — rejected: couples product semantics to a vendor.\n\n## Consequences\n\nEvery canonical object carries the standard envelope (tenant scope, provenance, version, trace\nIDs). Missing integrations appear as coverage/readiness gaps, never as a reduced contract.\n"}