Three repos, one runtime, four human gates: this is how enCODE actually runs.
The prospect demoboard argues the value; this one documents the machine. It maps the components that exist today, the workflow and workbench artifacts they produce, and exactly where the semantic layer work attaches to them. Written for the founding team and lead developers; it names collections, interfaces, and gates, and it must not travel outside ElevateNow.
Document
Engineering architecture
Audience
Founders + lead developers
Read time
12 minutes
Status basis
feature/sl-fnol-semantic
01Executive summaryOne page · Four takeaways
The semantic layer is additive to everything that runs today. Nothing existing is rewritten; four attachment points carry all of it.
Each takeaway summarizes a section of this demoboard. If only one page is read, this is the one.
I.
The current platform is three repos on one runtime, and it already produces every artifact the graph needs.
Tool fleet (elevatenow tool-chest), curation and rules (CurationStudio), workbench backend. Tool decisions in AGENT_RESPONSES and governed chunks in GKR are the graph's raw material; they exist today.
II.
Three context streams converge at one gate, and a human stands at every point the machine earns trust.
Transactional documents, structured claim data, and institutional rules meet in staging. Four HiL gates: rule approval, promotion review, authority escalation, tier-2 verification.
III.
A tool run is an activity, not a decision; AGENT_RESPONSES stays append-only and the graph is built downstream of it.
The enrichment pass reads what tools already wrote, mints DecisionEvents against the enc: registry, and never touches production collections. SPARQL is the contract; the store is configuration.
IV.
Phases 0 through 5 build the graph, 6 makes it portable, 7 and 8 make it a product.
SL-00 through SL-17 are the graph and its governance; SL-18/19 decouple store and mapping; SL-20 through SL-23 add NLQ and the deployable bundle, gated on acceptance.
02Current system contextExhibit 1 of 6
Everything ships from three repos onto one runtime. The semantic layer adds capability without adding a service the client must run.
Current components as deployed, with the semantic layer additions marked. The embedded graph tier means no new runtime dependency; Fuseki exists only as the reference remote endpoint for conformance testing.
1 · Repos, runtime, and where the new work lands
Read this as. An inventory, not a proposal. Everything grey exists and runs today; everything blue is the semantic layer attaching to it. The one deliberate absence: no mandatory new service. The embedded tier keeps the deployment footprint identical to today's.
03The convergence schematicExhibit 2 of 6
Three context streams converge at one gate, and a human stands at every point the machine earns trust.
Transactional context, structured data, and institutional knowledge each travel their own lane, converge in staging, and pass one promotion gate into the governed graph. The HG badge marks the four human-in-the-loop gates; nothing becomes a trusted fact or an unreviewed high-stakes action without crossing one.
2 · End-to-end convergence: three lanes, one gate, four human checkpoints
So what. This is the schematic that answers "how do transactional context, structured data, institutional knowledge, and humans come together." One convergence point, one gate, four human checkpoints, and a consumption row where every surface cites back into GKR. Anything that bypasses staging and the gate is by definition not a fact in this system.
04Workflow anatomyExhibit 3 of 6
A tool run is an activity, not a decision. AGENT_RESPONSES stays append-only, and the graph is built downstream of it.
The current workflow artifacts, end to end, for one WC FNOL case: Conductor sequences the tools, each tool grounds in GKR chunks, outputs persist append-only, and the enrichment pass reads them later. The semantic layer changes tool output schemas additively and touches nothing else in this path.
3 · One case through the tool fleet, and how a tool run becomes a DecisionEvent
Why this matters. The separation is the whole safety story: production tooling and the graph share data but never share write paths. That is why the branch can build the entire semantic layer with zero production breakage, and why a graph defect can never corrupt a tool decision already made.
The engineering thesis · in one sentence
Nothing becomes a fact in enCODE without passing a gate a human can stand behind.
ElevateNow Engineering · July 2026
05Semantic layer internalsExhibit 4 of 6
SPARQL is the contract. The store is configuration.
The internals in one view: what the enc: registry contains, how the GraphStore abstraction isolates every consumer from the store choice, and how a candidate fact earns promotion. Risk tiers decide which facts a human must see.
4 · Registry, GraphStore, and the promotion path with risk tiers
The commitment. Any consumer written against GraphStore runs unchanged on the embedded tier or a client's endpoint. The conformance suite is what makes that claim testable rather than aspirational: identical results from both stores on identical data, or the build fails.
06NLQ engine internalsExhibit 5 of 6
The engine can only say what the graph returned, and it must say which tier said it.
Two paths through the engine. Tier 1 runs governed templates with validated parameters; tier 2 generates SPARQL under hard constraints and is visibly degraded. The prose guard sits on both paths and blocks any sentence the result set cannot support.
5 · The NLQ pipeline: tier-1 path, tier-2 fallback, and the prose guard
Upshot. The example answer we do not ship: "this pattern warrants employer loss-control review." Unless a governed chunk produced that recommendation, the guard strips it. Fluency without governance is the one failure mode this product cannot afford, so it is blocked mechanically, not by prompt.
07Delivery mapExhibit 6 of 6
Phases 0 through 5 build the graph, 6 makes it portable, 7 and 8 make it a product.
The backlog as phases, with the gating that matters: nothing in NLQ starts before acceptance is green, and the bundle closes only on the end-to-end demonstration against a never-seen client schema.
6 · SL-00 through SL-23 as a phased delivery map
The commitment. The definition of done is deliberately identical to the sales demonstration. If engineering closes SL-23, the demo exists; there is no separate "make it demoable" project, and no claim in the prospect demoboard that this map does not back.