Ethos

The Ethos platform empowers leaders to govern their organizations with principle. It helps them close the gap between what the organization’s decision-makers intend, and what the organization does - connecting principled commitments with operational reality.

At its core, Ethos is built on four core concepts:

Together, these concepts form a chain of reference - through which an organization’s principles, types of business operations, and concrete operational events all become expressed within a single vocabulary.

Ethos enables organizations to engage with the platform’s concepts across three core modes of action:

Taken together, this set of actions allows organizations to operationalize their ethos - transforming their principles into live validation infrastructure.

A Library contains canonical semantic vocabulary that defines reusable concepts within Ethos. Each library defines a shared group of entries that become the stable building blocks referenced by every principle, instance, and record across the platform.

Key characteristics:

• Canonical: Each entry has a unique, stable identifier.
• Stable: New concepts can be introduced, but existing definitions are not redefined - preserving stability over time.
• Semantic: Each entry defines its expected semantic structure and default logical properties.
• Machine-readable: Definitions are expressed in formal terms that Ethos can interpret and validate in practice.
• Human-legible: Each entry can be viewed in descriptive, narrative terms - ensuring readability and supporting collaboration.

Why it matters:

The Library ensures consistency, reusability, comparability, and traceability across all levels of the Ethos platform. Every other object within the platform - principles, instances, and records - is composed of basic library entries, enabling reusable validation logic and stable, interoperable validation outcomes across disparate data sources.

A Principle in Ethos represents a governing logical model - a formal statement of how business operations should behave, according to an organization’s commitments, standards, rules, obligations, and values.

Principles transform decision-maker intentions into digital, machine-checkable assets.

Each Principle, expressed solely in Library terms, declares its required inputs. The Ethos platform can correspondingly statically enumerate these inputs. Principles are evaluated as constraint systems that consume data expressed through their declared inputs.

Key characteristics:

• Composed of Library References: Principles are built from canonical attributes and relationships defined in the Library.
• Deterministic: Each principle expresses valid, constraint-based logical statements.
• Intuitive: Principles can be authored explicitly, visually, or conversationally - remaining legible through the platform’s exhaustive logical constraints palette.
• Meaningful: Principles exist within a unified architecture of meaning - they cannot contradict each other or enter incoherent states.
• Versioned: Every revision of a principle is preserved immutably.
• Traceable: Each principle records who authored it, when, and from what prior version it derived.

Why it matters:

Principles formalize an organization’s stated commitments as actionable, checkable logic. Once authored, principles can be applied wherever business operations occur - making their alignment a continuous, verifiable guarantee.

Instance templates are the interface between an organization’s real-world business operations and the principles authored in Ethos. They determine where Ethos principles apply, and provide the structured template for operational records to be correctly interpreted.

An instance template is automatically derived as the minimal schema that satisfies the union of inputs of its governing principles; fields are imported from the Library, preventing issues arising from ad hoc, non-evaluable fields. This derived, formal schema is used by Ethos as the binding contract for data ingestion and validation.

Key characteristics:

• Derived, not Authored: Instances are automatically generated from governing principles. Their structure is derived from the logical implications that those principles create.
• Real-World Templates: Instances define the specific configuration of fields, types, and relationships that real-world records are expressed within.
• Governed: Each instance freely declares its governing principles, as well as the conditions under which they apply.
• Versioned: Every version of an instance is preserved immutably.
• Traceable: Each structural element in an instance can be traced back to the principle and library entry that defined it.

Why it matters:

Instances enable principles to be operationalized.

They are the practical bridge between abstract principles and real-world records - guaranteeing that validation occurs contextually, consistently, and correctly.

A record represents a specific business operation. It maps real-world operational data onto the structure provided by its associated instance - enabling the operation to be validated against applicable principles.

Records populate instance fields with concrete values. Ingestion enforces schema conformance and attaches provenance; non-conforming facts are quarantined and flagged for human review. All record validations produce deterministic proof objects referencing the specific facts and Ethos objects used.

Key characteristics:

• Concrete Data: Each record contains the actual values associated with a specific business operation.
• Validated: Every record is continuously validated against each of the principles that govern its parent instance - offering a line-by-line, per-constraint semantic rationale for alignment or non-alignment.
• Auditability: A record’s full history of validation outcomes is recorded immutably.
• Explainable: A record’s validation state provides live feedback about both its degree of alignment with applicable principles, as well as the formal rationale substantiating this validation outcome.

Why it matters:

Records are where validation happens.

Each record offers a live, verifiable assessment of whether the business operation it represents conforms to the organization’s authored principles.