Foundations & Governance•Knowledge Model

The 11 Canonical Knowledge Entities

AION strictly prohibits collapsing knowledge into a generic “document” abstraction or vector chunk. All public intelligence is parsed and persisted into eleven distinct, typed relational entities.

Constitutional Architecture Constraint

In standard RAG architectures, raw documents are split into arbitrary character chunks and embedded into vector space. This causes catastrophic epistemic loss: claims lose speaker attribution, temporal boundaries vanish, and conflicting reports are blended into hallucinations. AION enforces strict entity boundaries across all ingestion pipelines.

Source

ORIGIN

The publishing institution or monitored platform where public records originate (e.g., Federal Ministry of Finance, Premium Times, CBN Gazette).

Constitutional Rule: Stores publisher domain, accreditation level, bias flags, and historical reliability rating.

Schema: { id, name, domain, category, reliabilityScore, accreditationStatus }

Evidence

RECORD

The atomic physical material ingested into AION, stored immutably in Cloudflare R2 / S3 storage.

Constitutional Rule: Mandatorily stamped with SHA-256 content hash, publication date, and station collection timestamp. Tamper-evident.

Schema: { id, sourceId, canonicalUrl, contentHash, s3Uri, publishedAt, collectedAt, rawPayload }

Observation

EXTRACTION

A structured, atomic proposition extracted directly from verified evidence items using deterministic or LLM NLP methodology.

Constitutional Rule: Must cite specific evidence sentences. Observations describe what was reported, not physical reality.

Schema: { id, evidenceId, statement, extractionMethod, confidence, temporalAnchor }

Claim

PROPOSITION

An explicit factual or policy proposition asserted by a named actor or media entity, subject to verification or dispute.

Constitutional Rule: Can be corroborated, refuted, or revised over time. Never conflated with objective ground reality.

Schema: { id, speakerEntityId, statement, claimType, corroborationLevel, evidenceIds[] }

Event

TEMPORAL

An empirical occurrence anchored at an explicit moment in time and geographic coordinate, distinct from media commentary.

Constitutional Rule: Must possess unambiguous start/end timestamps and geographic bounds (State, LGA, or Geopolitical Zone).

Schema: { id, title, description, eventTime, location, certainty, associatedClaimIds[] }

Entity

ACTOR

A recognized person, ministry/department/agency (MDA), corporation, political party, or civic organization.

Constitutional Rule: Maintains canonical aliases, role histories, institutional affiliations, and temporal tenure boundaries.

Schema: { id, canonicalName, entityType, aliases[], officialDomain, metadata }

Topic

TAXONOMY

A thematic classification under national monitored domains (e.g., 'Primary Education Funding', 'Fuel Subsidy Deregulation').

Constitutional Rule: Organized hierarchically with parent/child links; tracks historical coverage baseline volumes.

Schema: { id, domain, slug, label, description, parentTopicId, baselineVolume }

Signal

DELTA

A mathematical indicator of change: volume surges, emergence velocity, or significant coverage anomalies.

Constitutional Rule: Computed strictly over longitudinal windows (e.g. 7d, 30d, 90d deviation from historical mean).

Schema: { id, topicId, signalType, windowStart, windowEnd, deltaPercentage, zScore }

Contradiction

DIVERGENCE

A first-class object connecting two or more mutually exclusive or conflicting claims made by different actors or reports.

Constitutional Rule: AION never resolves contradictions silently. It preserves the bilateral conflict with opposing citations.

Schema: { id, claimAId, claimBId, contradictionType, severity, detectedAt, resolutionStatus }

Population

STATISTICAL

A representative demographic proposition requiring national sampling integrity (e.g., NBS CPI, DHS surveys).

Constitutional Rule: Constitutional Law 5: Online discourse cannot be elevated into a population claim without demographic microdata.

Schema: { id, metricName, sampleSize, marginOfError, samplingMethodology, geographicSpread }

Revision

AUDIT

An append-only historical audit node tracking retractions, amended gazettes, or updated statistical figures.

Constitutional Rule: Past records are never deleted or overwritten. Superseded claims reference their prior states.

Schema: { id, targetEntity, targetId, previousState, newState, reason, timestamp }

Next Architectural Module

The 13-Field Answer Contract

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