Canonadr

ADR-2026-09-04-05 — Business Context is the center; Spine Fabric is the substrate

Status: ACCEPTED — 2026-09-04 (founder decisions; TIER-0 in the in-tree canon)

Context

Organizations do not run inside one tool; business meaning is distributed across CRM, ERP,
support, email, chat, files, projects, finance, databases and AI systems. Tools-first or
model-first designs repeat the fragmentation at machine speed. The Spine had also been described
inconsistently as "a database," an ESB, or a per-role schema.

Decision

  • Business Context is the core product concern and the top-level model: Mission → Objectives
    → Goals → KPIs → Initiatives → Work → Decisions → Actions → Outcomes → Learning link back
    through the Spine.
  • The Business Contextual Spine Fabric is the tenant-scoped governed canonical context
    network: tools connect once, governed context becomes reusable. It preserves semantic and
    temporal context (work, decisions, evidence, authority, outcomes over time) — which a
    transport bus does not.
  • The Spine is a logical contract, not a vendor database: physical storage (D1, Postgres/Neon,
    KV, R2, vector, queues) is a deployment ADR beneath the logical contract and must not redefine
    product semantics.
  • Continuity derives from four primitives: Event, Entity, Relationship, Synthesis.
  • Effective Spine is the mandatory Base Spine plus additive expansions only (department, industry,
    role, connector, tenant, contextual). No expansion may remove tenancy, provenance, authority,
    evidence, lifecycle, sync or reconciliation contracts.

Alternatives considered

  • Per-role or per-department databases — rejected: creates N copies of truth.
  • An ESB/message-bus framing — rejected: transports messages but does not preserve context,
    continuity, evidence or authority.
  • A single physical store as canonical — rejected: couples product semantics to a vendor.

Consequences

Every canonical object carries the standard envelope (tenant scope, provenance, version, trace
IDs). Missing integrations appear as coverage/readiness gaps, never as a reduced contract.