SpecDossier exists for governability: of proposals, tasks and actions — widening the territory, changing the rules of government, easing the tension in projects that evolve with ontoref. It is one specialized part beside ontoref, signatio and an orchestrator such as vapora, and the responsibility for SOWs is and will stay ontoref's.
Measured on 2026-09-28 against a real specdossierd, what had been built was usable by nobody: a SOW's review could not close in SpecDossier (the 'Reviewed event is written by ontoref), the remarks of a round turned stale on the next revision and nothing gathered them, `/` answered 404, desk had no code, and no walk contract described anyone doing their work end to end. It had been built as the owner and executor of the SOW protocol — its schema, its ratification policy, its acts, the refutation of its contracts — a frame this record replaces; the first text of this ADR (2026-09-27) is in the spine's history.
The principal bounded the project in an interview on 2026-09-28; the spine's core.ncl carries it, each node citing that interview as its warrant. Its fundamentals: nothing is left behind; work is bounded; what is delivered meets the criteria and objectives the project declared; priority is decided at a point by who answers for it; with ontoref, work is done for the right reasons by the right modes; always accredited, never asserted; and every task carries a responsibility no agent assumes. SpecDossier does not sign, implement nor present for execution. It has no judgment on the content of a work — its actions, why and how they were written, whether its checks and their refutations are adequate: that takes the context, knowledge and modes ontoref has, and questioning it is returned to an agent working with the destination project. It keeps no register of projects: it goes to the project and composes the dossier from what is there. The object is any governed document, in Markdown or NCL — a work order, an ADR, a biop — carried to a version agreed by its digest, so that anyone can verify that what sits in the project is what was agreed. It is a deployed service with a backend, a CLI and desk, for many people. A project that makes it part of its governance grants it a channel — route, identity, permissions — to read its dossiers and land the agreed result; every operation on it is logged, as signatio logs its own; a guest with no access to the project sees only the part of the work put to them.
SPECDOSSIER IS WHERE THE WORK A PROJECT GOVERNS IS BOUNDED, REVIEWED BY THE PEOPLE WHO ANSWER FOR IT, AGREED BY ITS DIGEST AND FOLLOWED AFTERWARDS. A dossier is opened in a project around one governed document or several — a work order, an ADR, a biop — and declares at opening how it closes: signature or none, who is invited, an expiry, blocked, done. Its rounds end in a version the person who answers declares agreed, fixed by its digest; what follows is shown against it.
IT EXPOSES; IT DOES NOT ACT AND DOES NOT JUDGE THE CONTENT. SpecDossier does not sign, implement nor present a work for execution, and it never decides validity. It does not run a work's checks nor refute them, and it does not rule on whether they are adequate: that is ontoref's, which evaluates and proposes a plan with its context and modes. What SpecDossier establishes is mechanical identity — whether a file is still the agreed one by its digest, whether a signature verifies — and the evidence others produced, shown as they produced it. A work whose content is to be questioned is returned to an agent working with the destination project.
IT READS THE FORMATS OTHERS OWN. The SOW, its ratification policy, the ADR and the biop are ontoref's formats, and the refutation of a check is ontoref's mechanism; signatio's answers are signatio's. SpecDossier reads them as published, imports nothing of theirs, and every dependency on them stays optional. What is its own is the dossier: its format, the agreement by digest, the trail.
IT WRITES INTO A PROJECT ONLY BY THE CHANNEL THE PROJECT GRANTS. What a dossier agreed and the trail it shows live in the project's files; nothing the service stores becomes the record. The service writes into a project only through the channel that project credited, and logs every operation on it, signed by its own key and verifiable by anyone.
IT HOLDS NO SIGNER'S KEY, AND IDENTITY IS THE AUTHORITY'S. Signatures are made on the signer's machine; who someone is and which hats they hold is signatio's answer, verified against pinned keys; the service keeps no table of people and never holds a person's token.
WHAT THIS DOES NOT DECIDE: where in a project its dossiers live and how SpecDossier learns their address, with no dossier format yet to decide it against; and how ontoref reflects this in its adr-119 amendment of 2026-09-27 and in adr-124, which is read from ontoref.
The schemas that carry ontoref's SOW format and ratification policy do not declare themselves SpecDossier's protocol
No crate of the workspace contains a work's checks, refutes them or judges their result; a check the project declares may be run by the CLI in the person's copy, its report shown as produced (adr-007)
No .ncl of the repository imports a file outside it, and no Cargo manifest has a path dependency outside it
No source of the service or the core names a signing key type
SpecDossier's copies of ontoref's formats carry ontoref's installed code line for line, comments aside
The service stores no stage: none of its tables holds one
The service writes into a project only through the channel that project credited — route, identity, permissions — and nowhere else
Every operation the service performs on a project is written to its log, signed by the service's own key and verifiable by anyone with its public key
SpecDossier owns the SOW protocol and its acts (the first text of this ADR, and ontoref's adr-124 amendment 0f89aa5)
Rejected: Rejected by the principal on 2026-09-28: the responsibility for SOWs is ontoref's; SpecDossier does not sign, implement nor present for execution.
SpecDossier runs and refutes a work's contracts (witness v2, the refutation semantics held as its protocol)
Rejected: It judges content without the context, knowledge and modes to do it; the refutation is ontoref's mechanism, and questioning a work goes back to an agent with the destination project.
A register of every project and of what was done in it
Rejected: SpecDossier goes to the project and composes the dossier from what is there (principal, P2).
A repository only the service writes, as the record
Rejected: Landing an agreement means writing into the project; the principal accredited a channel the project grants, with permissions and a signed log.
SpecDossier supplies criteria and governance to projects without ontoref
Rejected: Not its purpose: at most it may offer elements for a template or a qa entry as a proposal.
The review flow inside ontoref-daemon or inside signatio
Rejected: Inside ontoref-daemon it excludes people and projects without the daemon; inside signatio it puts editing beside the process that holds the authority's key (signatio's ADR-001).