Practical review guide revised September 17, 2026. The linked published essays retain their original text. For current status and source documents, use the publication record.
Architecture reference companion
Use one concrete state change to identify the undertaking, its governing conditions, the decision and the resulting evidence. Then connect the finding to the family functions and public record.
- The Missing Dimension: The published essay follows the conceptual discovery and the sequence behind it.
Choose a single change in an interaction your organization already runs. A support call starts recording. A waiting participant is admitted. A service moves processing to another location. Use that transition to identify what was authorized, what changes and which authority remains responsible for the result.
The exercise starts with the work. Write a short account of the undertaking, including its participants, permitted outcome and stopping condition. Then identify the systems that hold pieces of that account. This makes the review concrete before introducing the SSOAR terminology.
Name the undertaking
Separate the work from the connections supporting it. One undertaking may use several connections over its lifetime; one connection may support several kinds of work. State how your system recognizes the particular undertaking under review and how it distinguishes that work from a new assignment.
Draw two views of the transition
In the first view, show the components: endpoints, routing, processing, storage and the controls that each applies. In the second, show the sequence: request, evaluation, accepted or refused change, resulting state and recorded outcome. Put the same transition in both views and identify where each decision is made.
Look for a point where one component assumes another has established permission. Make that assumption explicit. The review should be able to identify the authority and the evidence relied on at that point.
State what must continue to hold
List the conditions that remain binding during the selected change. These might concern participants, recipients, permitted operations, processing locations or retained records. Determine whether a substitute service receives the current conditions and whether anything prevents it from acting on an obsolete version.
Include a refusal case. If the proposed change cannot satisfy those conditions, show which component stops it, what state remains valid and how authorized work can continue or close.
Inspect the evidence at the transition
Collect the starting state, the request, the governing conditions, the decision and the accepted result. Examine how those elements are associated. Ask whether a reviewer can establish that the recorded result followed the controlling decision, including when messages arrive late or components retry.
Choose the relevant family functions
Use the family map to connect the observed transition to the proposed functions. Hermes-Echo addresses session change, Warten the pre-admission interval and Ludwig’s Raven accessible participation. The seven siblings address changes involving AI services, session graphs, devices, computing resources, provenance, processing location and trust.
Select the functions involved in the particular undertaking. A useful review can begin with one transition; it does not require every family function to be active in the same system.
Put the explanation beside the public record
Read the issued Hermes-Echo claims and prosecution summary for the examined anchor. Read Hecate for the published continuation’s treatment of selected data assets. The publication record identifies the status and available evidence for the other filings.
Keep the observed implementation, the architectural explanation and the applicable claim language available together. Each answers a different part of the diligence question.
Return with a concrete finding
The result of this exercise is a transition that another reviewer can follow: its undertaking, controlling conditions, decision and recorded effect. Where a relationship cannot be established, name the missing mechanism or evidence. That gives the next engineering conversation a specific problem to resolve.
For the account of how this architectural object came into view, read the full published essay, The Missing Dimension.
Use this page in a system review
- What undertaking is continuing across the proposed change?
- Which authority remains binding before, during and after that transition?
- Which parts of the explanation are an architectural proposition, and which limitations appear in the applicable claim text?