research: validate a provenance-preserving context graph

[Teingi]

Feature description

Research and validate a provenance-preserving context graph for relationship retrieval and reasoning.

The graph should be a rebuildable projection over exact Sources and Artifact Revisions, never a second authority for facts or a mandatory database dependency.

Problem and proposed solution

Keyword, vector, hybrid, and reranked retrieval are effective for local similarity, but some questions depend on explicit relationships:

• which decision depends on a constraint that later changed;
• which Handoff, Task Outcome, Experience, and Skill share the same evidence;
• which components, people, incidents, tickets, or documents are connected across time;
• what downstream context may be affected by revising or retiring one exact asset.

Legacy PowerMem graph issues such as #1002 and #1004 show why a new PowerContext design must start from scope isolation, exact provenance, idempotency, and migration rather than reuse the old graph schema.

The research should define and prototype:

• versioned entity and relation identities with exact Source/Artifact evidence refs;
• temporal validity, contradictory claims, supersession, and uncertainty;
• scope and resource authorization before traversal;
• deterministic relations already present in PowerContext lineage before model-extracted relations;
• bounded extraction, entity resolution, deduplication, and abstention for model-derived edges;
• projection rebuild, drift detection, deletion/erasure handling, and backend portability;
• a provider-neutral graph query port that can run on a simple relational projection before requiring a graph database;
• hybrid retrieval that returns exact authoritative citations and explains which relation path contributed.

Start with one discriminative use case, such as decision-impact analysis or cross-artifact evidence tracing, and compare it against the current hybrid/rerank baseline.

Acceptance criteria

• Every returned entity, edge, and reasoning path is backed by exact evidence or explicitly marked derived/uncertain.
• Cross-scope and unauthorized entities cannot become search seeds, traversal nodes, counts, or error details.
• Replaying the same evidence is idempotent, and changing extraction configuration produces a distinguishable projection version.
• Contradictory or superseded relations remain representable; the graph does not silently choose one as current truth.
• Removing or erasing evidence invalidates/rebuilds affected projections without redirecting citations to another Revision.
• A bounded evaluation reports task success, citation/path correctness, leakage tests, latency, storage, extraction cost, freshness, and abstention against the current baseline.
• No public graph API or default dependency ships until the research shows a measurable benefit and an RFC accepts the contract.
• The first implementation can use SQLite/OceanBase tables or another replaceable backend; a graph database is not mandatory.

Alternatives considered

• Reintroduce the legacy PowerMem graph store: its identities and isolation model predate current PowerContext Sources, Artifact Revisions, and authorization boundaries.
• Store model-extracted graph facts as authority: model output may be incomplete or wrong and must remain a projection over evidence.
• Adopt a graph database first: selects infrastructure before proving a product use case or retrieval gain.
• Infer relations at query time only: avoids storage but makes results expensive, non-reproducible, and difficult to audit.

Additional context

Related: #1263 for evaluation infrastructure, #1356 for explainability, #1395 for authorization, and the existing Source/Artifact lineage model.

• I am willing to contribute code, docs, or design feedback.