ADR-A96: Instrument provision attachment

Status: Accepted Date: 2026-09-25 (proposed), 2026-09-25 (accepted) Related: ADR-A07b (minimal Instrument shape), ADR-A86 Unit: applied-ontology-readiness (AOR-17)

Context

ins:inProvision is functional, so an obligation is attached to at most one provision. Governing documents routinely express one obligation in several provisions: a bilingual subscription agreement whose two language versions are both authoritative, a consolidated policy that restates a clause in a schedule, an amendment that repeats an obligation in its new wording. Under the functional axiom, a reasoner given two provisions for one obligation infers the two provisions are the same individual, merging distinct provisions without error.

Decision

1. ins:inProvision is no longer functional. An obligation may be attached to several provisions. ins:hasObligation, its inverse, is unchanged.
2. Single attachment stays available as an option. Instrument’s shapes gain ins:SingleProvisionShape (sh:maxCount 1 on ins:inProvision), declared in a separate optional shapes file that a deployment loads when its documents attach each obligation once.

Consequences

• Instrument takes a MINOR bump under ADR-A86: a cardinality is widened and no conformant graph stops conforming. One entailment is removed (two provisions of one obligation are no longer inferred equal). That is a judgement call recorded here, since a graph relying on the inferred equality changes meaning. It is classified MINOR, not MAJOR, because the removed inference merged provisions their authors had named separately.
• Examples: a bilingual subscription agreement and a consolidated employment policy.