We are becoming very good at proving things about ourselves.
A credential can cross a network in milliseconds, and a signature can be checked just as quickly. A notice can be recorded, and a mandate expressed in a form another system already knows how to read.
The real meaning, the substance behind the claim, moves differently. It doesn't compress into a packet. It has to be lived, held, recognised or renewed through the relationships that sustain it.
A document can say trustee, but the trust relationship is something else: an ongoing set of duties and reliances that the document only points to. A passport can record citizenship. The person it names carries a whole history the passport never touches. A credential can say that someone belongs to a community, but belonging lives in a deeper matrix of recognition and history, and the credential is a marker laid on top of it.
This is where SILT Core v0.2 makes a deliberate distinction.
It treats Standing as a relational position, grounded in Source. The Source may be an agreement, appointment, relationship, customary process, collective recognition, institutional order, or another relevant ground.
What matters here isn't the category. It's the order.
The ground comes first. Its representation comes after, and depends on it.
That creates an awkward problem for machine-readable identity. Machines need artefacts to work with. Relations exceed whatever artefact is used to represent them.
Credentials, registries and proofs remain essential. The risk is letting the representation outlive the reality it was meant to describe.
A community withdraws its recognition from a representative. The relationship has changed, but the credential still reads authorised representative.
The record has not noticed that the world moved.
Gradually, the world is asked to resemble the record.
SILT keeps this seam visible by keeping Standing grounded in Source rather than in the artefact that happens to evidence it. A Presentation brings only a bounded expression of that Standing into an encounter. The conditions against which it is evaluated are themselves bounded expressions, not assumed to contain the whole legal, customary, institutional or relational order behind them.
This matters when the edges do not line up neatly.
A community may be internally contested. Two normative orders may apply different conditions to the same Presentation. Relevant meaning may be unavailable, withheld, or impossible to express without distortion.
SILT does not require those differences to disappear merely because a machine needs an answer.
Where the expressed conditions are insufficient, INDETERMINATE is one of three defined evaluation outcomes, alongside SATISFIED and NOT_SATISFIED. It is not a vague fallback for uncertainty. It means that the supplied semantic state does not justify a stronger conclusion without importing a missing fact, an unstated rule or an external judgement.
And where several Profile Expressions apply, their results can remain distinct. SILT does not silently merge, rank or privilege them simply to manufacture a single answer. If there is no expressed basis for precedence, the disagreement remains visible.
There is a cost to that refusal. Sometimes the honest result is slower, messier and less convenient than a clean boolean. It may require another Presentation, another source of evidence, negotiation, human judgement, or simply an acknowledgement that this encounter cannot yet be resolved.
That is not a failure state SILT tries to hide.
It is part of the architecture.
So perhaps the harder question is no longer simply:
Can the machine verify this?
But:
What exactly has been made legible here, under whose conditions, and what remains unresolved beyond the proof?
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SILT is an open standards and research project exploring how different systems of identity, authority and legitimacy can become mutually legible without being collapsed into a single model.