dev.idiolect.encounter

A signed record of a single lens invocation. Encounters are the emergent-channel primitive: they record that a translation occurred, with enough context for aggregators (observations) and correctors to reason about it. Narrative commentary lives in annotations; the structured payload in use covers the action / material / purpose / actor of the invocation.

Source: lexicons/dev/idiolect/encounter.json · Rust: idiolect_records::Encounter · TS: @idiolect-dev/schema/encounter · Fixture: idiolect_records::examples::encounter

Shape

Field	Type	Required	Notes
`lens`	`lensRef`	yes	The lens that was invoked.
`sourceSchema`	`schemaRef`	yes	Source schema the lens translated from.
`targetSchema`	`schemaRef`	no	Target schema produced by the lens. Often implied by the lens; elided when unambiguous.
`sourceInstance`	`cid-link`	no	Content-addressed reference to the source instance. Omit when visibility restricts publishing source data.
`producedOutput`	`cid-link`	no	Content-addressed reference to the produced output.
`use`	`use`	yes	Structured action / material / purpose / actor.
`downstreamResult`	open enum	no	`success` / `corrected` / `rejected` / `unknown`.
`downstreamResultVocab`	`vocabRef`	no	Vocab the slug resolves against.
`annotations`	string (≤4000 graphemes)	no	Narrative commentary.
`holder`	did	no	Party the encounter is attributed to. Omit for first-party records.
`basis`	`basis`	no	Structured grounding when `holder` differs from the repo owner.
`kind`	open enum	yes	Corpus-kind slug (`invocation-log`, `curated`, `roundtrip-verified`, `production`, `adversarial`).
`kindVocab`	`vocabRef`	no	Vocab the kind slug resolves against.
`visibility`	`visibility`	yes	`public-detailed` / `public-minimal` / `public-aggregate-only` / `community-scoped` / `private`.
`occurredAt`	datetime	yes	When the invocation happened. Distinct from the record's `createdAt`.

Field details

`use`

The structured payload. A use carries:

action (open-enum slug, resolved against actionVocabulary).
material (a materialSpec: scope plus optional corpus pointer).
purpose (open-enum slug, resolved against purposeVocabulary).
actor (string; who ultimately performs or benefits).

All four together form the "what was done, on what, for what end, by which actor" tuple. Consumers that match on actions match on subsumption against the referenced vocabulary, not on substring equality. Two communities that disagree on whether train_model subsumes fine_tune produce different routing decisions from the same encounter, which is the right answer.

`kind`

The encounter-kind slug declares what the corpus represents:

Slug	Meaning
`invocation-log`	A real production invocation.
`curated`	A hand-picked sample, often used for evaluation.
`roundtrip-verified`	An invocation where `put(get(a)) == a` was verified at write time.
`production`	Synonym for `invocation-log` in some pipelines; exists for distinct trust weighting.
`adversarial`	An invocation explicitly chosen to stress the lens.

Observers declare in their method which kinds they weight and how. An observation aggregating invocation-log plus curated encounters is meaningfully different from one aggregating only adversarial ones; the kind plus the observer's method together is what makes the observation interpretable.

`downstreamResult`

The invoking party's at-record-time assessment of the outcome:

Slug	Meaning
`success`	The output was accepted unchanged.
`corrected`	The output was edited; a `dev.idiolect.correction` record exists or is expected.
`rejected`	The output was unusable.
`unknown`	The party publishing did not know yet.

corrected is the link between the emergent-channel encounter record and the correction record that documents the edit. Consumers reading correction records traverse back through the encounter's downstreamResult to confirm the link.

`holder` and `basis`

Most encounters are first-party: the repo owner is the party that invoked the lens. Some are third-party: a labeler records that another party invoked a lens. holder names the party the record is attributed to; basis carries structured grounds for the attribution (a community policy, an external signal, an inference from another record). See defs#basis for the variants.

`visibility`

The five values are policy hints, not access control. The substrate does not enforce them today. Records marked community-scoped should not be served to parties outside the named community once the substrate supports scope enforcement; records marked private should not be published at all.

Example

{
  "$type": "dev.idiolect.encounter",
  "lens":         { "uri": "at://did:plc:lens-author/dev.panproto.schema.lens/3l5" },
  "sourceSchema": { "uri": "at://did:plc:schema-author/dev.panproto.schema.schema/v1" },
  "targetSchema": { "uri": "at://did:plc:schema-author/dev.panproto.schema.schema/v2" },
  "use": {
    "action":   "train_model",
    "material": { "scope": "production_logs" },
    "purpose":  "non_commercial",
    "actor":    "researchers"
  },
  "downstreamResult": "success",
  "kind":             "invocation-log",
  "visibility":       "public-detailed",
  "occurredAt":       "2026-04-19T12:30:00.000Z"
}

How encounters are consumed

flowchart LR
    PUB[publisher] -->|writes| ENC[encounter]
    ENC -->|firehose| OBS[observer]
    OBS -->|tally| OBSREC[observation]
    ENC -.referenced by.-> COR[correction]
    ENC -.referenced by.-> RET[retrospection]
    OBSREC -.cited by.-> BEL[belief]

An encounter is the unit; observations and corrections reference it. A dev.idiolect.belief may cite either the encounter directly (for narrow claims) or an observation that aggregated it (for broad claims). A dev.idiolect.retrospection references an encounter to record a delayed finding about it.