Distributed Cognitive Network

Volume XI — Federation and Network Protocol

Draft Specification 0.1

1. Purpose

This volume defines how autonomous Minds, organizations, expert providers, K-line publishers, evaluators, and markets participate in a federated Distributed Cognitive Network without creating a single canonical global brain.

2. Federation Principle

The network shares cognition; the local Mind decides what becomes active.

Federation distributes discoverable cognitive capital and evidence. It does not distribute mandatory cognition.

3. Federated Objects

Participants MAY publish or exchange:

ComponentDescriptor
CapabilityDescriptor
KLineTemplate
KLineArtifact metadata
EvaluationClaim
Evidence references
ExpertOffer
ArtifactOffer
Acts
Semantic fingerprints
Revocation/supersession statements

Private world state and working memory are not federation primitives.

4. Discovery

Discovery SHOULD be capability-first. A Mind asks which entities can satisfy a semantic requirement rather than searching only by vendor identity.

Discovery MAY occur through registries, Actum Compute, organization directories, peer exchange, or cached catalogs.

5. Identity

Federation distinguishes authored object identity, exact content identity, and semantic similarity. Cryptographic identity MUST NOT be inferred from semantic similarity.

6. K-Line Federation

K-lines are globally shareable but not globally authoritative. A Mind may discover multiple competing K-lines for the same problem class and independently evaluate, cache, activate, fork, or reject them.

7. Artifact Distribution

Artifact distribution SHOULD include content hash, template identity, publisher, compiler lineage, dependencies, runtime target, evaluation claims, and security metadata.

8. Expert Federation

Remote experts expose semantic capabilities through Cognitive ABI descriptors and transport bindings. A2A MAY be used for autonomous peer interaction; MCP MAY be used for capability invocation.

9. Protocol Layering

Cognitive ABI   semantic contract
MCP             tool/capability transport binding
A2A             agent/Mind interaction binding
Agent Plugins   distribution/packaging
Actum Compute   economic discovery/resolution
Actum           durable verifiable history/finality

The federation protocol does not require one transport.

10. Trust Exchange

Participants exchange evidence, not mandatory trust scores. Local Minds derive trust from their own policies and observations.

11. Evaluation Federation

Evaluation claims SHOULD include protocol, subject, distribution/environment commitment, evaluator, result, evidence, and timestamp. Claims may conflict; conflict is preserved rather than erased.

12. Supersession and Revocation

Federated objects MAY be superseded or revoked by authorized publishers or trust systems. Historical objects remain addressable for lineage and audit.

13. Synchronization

Synchronization exchanges immutable or versioned objects and Acts rather than synchronizing entire mutable databases.

Minds SHOULD be able to operate offline and reconcile later.

14. Caching

Federated content MAY be cached with validity, provenance, trust, and revalidation metadata. Cache freshness is part of admissibility.

15. Organization Boundaries

Organizations MAY operate private federation domains containing private K-lines, experts, artifacts, evaluations, and trust roots while selectively interacting with the public network.

16. Cross-Mind Delegation

A Mind MAY delegate bounded work to another Mind. Delegation MUST carry explicit capability, context, authority, privacy, evidence, budget, and deadline constraints.

The receiving Mind remains autonomous and may reject the request.

17. Human Federation

Humans and organizations may participate as experts or evaluators through adapters. The protocol does not require participants to be software agents.

18. Poisoning Resistance

Minds SHOULD defend against Sybil publication, malicious K-lines, benchmark gaming, coordinated evaluations, dependency substitution, stale artifacts, and semantic-name squatting.

19. Network Partitions

Local cognition continues during partitions. Remote-dependent tasks may defer, degrade to local alternatives, or request human intervention according to policy.

20. Federation Invariants

1. There is no mandatory canonical K-line store.
2. Discovery does not imply trust.
3. Trust does not imply authority.
4. Publication does not imply local activation.
5. Semantic similarity does not imply identity.
6. Federation preserves provenance and conflicting claims.
7. Minds remain useful offline where local capability permits.
8. Private world state is not a federation requirement.
9. Transport protocols do not define cognitive policy.
10. Local Minds retain final activation decisions.