Picture the decision as a solid you can turn in your hands. From where you happen to be standing it looks whole, and it may well be, on that face. The fracture is on a face you never turned to look at. Integrity is not how it holds from one angle. It is whether it holds turned to every one.
Each face is a standard, and each names a distinct way a decision can pass the check you ran and fail the one you didn’t. They run from meaning at the top, what the words are required to mean, down to time at the base, whether it still holds once the clock has run.
Top of mindThe source everything references
Meaning Integrity
Pin what the words require, once. Everything downstream inherits it.
A standard is transclusive: the meaning is fixed in one place and referenced everywhere it applies. Call a system secure, an outcome verified, a result additional, without pinning down what those words require, and every check built on top is quietly measuring air. The most expensive failures begin here, as a term allowed to mean whatever the moment needs, and the whole structure referencing it inherits the vagueness without anyone noticing.
Read the standard →01Structural Integrity
The system holds under pressure.
A sound structure is one where who can act, what needs someone else's consent, and how the whole thing behaves as it grows are all decided and written down before they are ever tested. When that groundwork is in place, no single actor can quietly bend the system to their own advantage. When it is missing, the failure arrives wearing a familiar face: a trusted insider, an admin key nobody constrained, or a design that simply comes apart the moment it meets ten times the load it was built for.
02Data Integrity
The evidence earns its place.
Trustworthy evidence is graded honestly on the way in and carries its own proof on the way out. Every source is rated for how much of its reliability you can actually see, and every result travels with what a reader needs to verify it for themselves. Nothing gets quietly laundered from a shaky input into a confident conclusion, because the uncertainty stays visible the entire way through, right up to the moment someone acts on it.
03Evaluation Integrity
The reasoning is open to inspection.
Sound reasoning is reasoning that anyone can follow and, if they disagree, challenge. Every step from evidence to decision is written down in a form that could be shown wrong, so a conclusion is never something you take on the author's word. It is something you can check, contest, and, when it holds up, defend with confidence, because the whole path from the world to the decision is out in the open.
Emerging · forthcomingSpecification in progress
Temporal Integrity
Sound now, not only when it was made.
The newest face being cut: whether a reading, a proof, or a decision still holds at the moment it is used, not only when it was produced. A stale truth is its own kind of broken.