A relationship should say what kind of relationship it is.
Semantic Federation asks whether the equivalence and coherence ideas discovered in geometry survive contact with legal, operational, audit, vocabulary, healthcare, versioning, and historical-time problems.
Experiments 012–022 resolve into Transport, Federation, and Governance rather than one universal semantic relation engine.
What the experiments forced us to add
The important result was not a universal mapping algebra. It was the opposite: the research kept finding coordinates that a responsible relation claim cannot safely erase.
Different institutional views can be related without declaring them identical.
Sharing a subject is not enough. Some apparently related views are complementary, dependent, or explicitly non-equivalent.
Separate the relation witness from the policy that defines inverse, symmetry, composition, entailment, and integrity.
External vocabulary standards force different relation kinds to obey different laws rather than one hidden transitivity rule.
Source and target are insufficient: scope version, context, products/effects, and explicit no-mapping claims can be part of identity.
The law itself has effectivity. Historical replay is distinct from reinterpretation under the current law, and migration can be lossy.
Retirement adds another coordinate: a timeline does not decide whether still-live dependents are grandfathered, migrated, reviewed, ceased, or rejected as invalid new use.
Downstream graph reachability is not causal evidence. Impact propagates only through declared causal dependencies under explicit rules; references and same-subject links can remain unaffected.
Compatible local perspectives can support one global account without a master schema when required overlap roles connect and alternate translation laws are coherent.
Revision recency does not confer authority. Role-scoped authority can preserve a qualified assembly with known stale projections, while authority conflict/gaps fail closed and contestation triggers review without automatic override.
Local views can export bounded disclosure packets instead of complete records. Undisclosed, unknown, policy-prohibited and incompatible states remain distinct; trusted predicate attestations can support a qualified assembly without claiming exact equivalence.
A receipt can say transported, not applicable, explicitly negative, conflicting, ambiguous, unknown, or lossy—without forcing every case into mapped/not-mapped.
Relation identity is not witness identity.
The semantic claim can remain stable while its evidence or provenance coordinates change.
Translation can be situated.
A relation can apply in one jurisdiction, product, role, or schema revision and fail to apply in another.
Unknown is different from no.
An explicit non-mapping is evidence. Missing evidence is a different state and should not be silently converted into a negative claim.
Reasoning is not institutional standing.
A relation engine can execute or validate a claim; adoption, admission, and obligation remain governed human/institutional acts.