We validate every record against one exact version of the rules, named by the cryptographic digest of the rules themselves, so that what a record was checked against can be stated and rechecked years later.
The problem a name cannot solve
A schema called “customer, version 3” is a name, and a name can be reassigned. The rules behind it can be edited, a field can be relaxed, a constraint can be dropped, and every record that was ever validated still says it passed “version 3”. The claim survives while its meaning drifts.
A digest closes that gap. We take the rules as bytes, compute a hash of those bytes, and use the hash as the version. Two rule sets with the same digest are the same rules; a rule set that has changed by one character has a different digest. The name is now a fact about the content, not a label somebody chose.
What we pin, and where
We pin the ontology and its constraints, and we store the digest beside every record at write time. A record therefore carries the identity of the exact rules it satisfied. Your audit question changes from “which version was in force that quarter?” to “here is the digest; here are the rules that hash to it; here is the check”.
The same mechanism is how a container image, a Git commit or a published package is pinned, which is why it is understood by every engineer who reviews it and by every tool that fetches it.
What it makes provable
With the digest recorded, we can re-run the validation of any record at any later date against the rules it names, and get the same answer. Version drift becomes visible as a change of digest rather than an argument about what a label meant. That is the foundation the rest of deterministic governance stands on: the attestation, the audit trail and the materialisation all refer to rules that cannot move.
