Trust

How Mareforma derives trust from graph topology, not from agent self-reporting.

Trust in a claim is a property of its position in the graph, not a property of the agent that made it.

There is no confidence score. An agent that is wrong is still confident. The graph does not ask the agent how sure it is — it tracks what the agent can demonstrate.

Support levels

PRELIMINARY

One agent claimed it. Could be correct. No independent confirmation yet.

Set automatically at INSERT. Every new claim starts here.

REPLICATED

≥2 agents with different generated_by values share the same upstream in supports[], AND at least one of those upstreams is itself ESTABLISHED. Set automatically at INSERT. No extra step required.

The ESTABLISHED-upstream rule (added currently) matches Cochrane / GRADE evidence-chain methodology — replication-of-noise is not replication. A fresh project bootstraps the chain via a seed claim (see below).

ESTABLISHED

A human (an enrolled validator) reviewed the provenance chain and validated it. Only reachable via graph.validate(). No agent can self-promote.

This is the gate for consequential actions.

How REPLICATED fires

ESTABLISHED upstream ──► ANALYTICAL claim (lab_a, generated_by="agent/a")  ──┐
                                                                              ├──► REPLICATED
ESTABLISHED upstream ──► ANALYTICAL claim (lab_b, generated_by="agent/b")  ──┘

Three conditions must all be true:

1. Both claims reference the same upstream in supports[]
2. Both claims have different generated_by values
3. At least one shared upstream is itself ESTABLISHED

A single agent asserting the same claim a thousand times is still PRELIMINARY. Independence of provenance paths is what matters, not count.

Bootstrapping a fresh project (seed claim)

On a brand new graph, no claim is yet ESTABLISHED, so the third condition above can never be satisfied. An enrolled validator (typically the project’s root, auto-enrolled on first open) bootstraps the chain by asserting a seed claim — a claim inserted directly at ESTABLISHED with a signed seed envelope.

import mareforma

with mareforma.open() as graph:
    # Bootstrap the chain. Only an enrolled validator can produce a seed.
    seed_id = graph.assert_claim(
        "Prior literature establishes X under condition C",
        classification="DERIVED",
        generated_by="agent/seed",
        seed=True,
    )

    # Downstream peers now have an ESTABLISHED upstream to converge on.
    id_a = graph.assert_claim(
        "Finding A consistent with X",
        supports=[seed_id],
        generated_by="agent/model-a",
    )
    id_b = graph.assert_claim(
        "Finding B consistent with X",
        supports=[seed_id],
        generated_by="agent/model-b",
    )

    graph.get_claim(id_a)["support_level"]  # → "REPLICATED"
    graph.get_claim(id_b)["support_level"]  # → "REPLICATED"

Artifact-hash gate

When two converging peers BOTH supply artifact_hash (a SHA-256 hex digest of the output bytes — figure, CSV, model), the hashes must match for REPLICATED to fire. Identity convergence alone is no longer enough in that case. When either peer omits the hash, the gate is bypassed and identity-only REPLICATED applies — the signal is opt-in, not retroactive.

The hash is part of the signed payload, so an attacker who edits the column without the private key breaks verification.

How ESTABLISHED is reached

# Only after REPLICATED — will raise ValueError if PRELIMINARY
graph.validate(claim_id, validated_by="[e-mail]")

graph.validate() is identity-gated. The graph must have a loaded signing key AND that key must be enrolled in the project’s validators table. The first key opened against a fresh graph auto-enrolls as the root validator (silent self-signed enrollment with a UserWarning). Additional validators are added via mareforma validator add or graph.enroll_validator().

The validation event itself is signed: a DSSE-style envelope binding (claim_id, validator_keyid, validated_at) is persisted to the claim’s validation_signature column. validated_by is a cosmetic display label; the authoritative identity is the keyid embedded in the signed envelope.

validate() raises ValueError if the claim is not yet REPLICATED, if no signer is loaded, or if the loaded signer is not enrolled.

What trust is not

ESTABLISHED does not mean the claim is true. The graph records what agents assert and what the provenance structure supports. A REPLICATED finding can still be wrong if both agents were reasoning from the same false prior.

Trust in Mareforma is a structural property — a measure of how the finding was reached, not of whether it is correct.