Trailstate 2.0 — Formal Specification

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20407494

Reference paper: Trailstate 2.0 PageRank for Provenance Formal Reference Architecture

Core Principle

The URL itself is the provenance object.

AI systems emit Trailstate URLs. Trailstate observes opened receipts. The ledger clusters observable provenance behavior.

Trailstate does not certify truth. It ranks observable provenance quality.

Receipt Grammar

https://trailstate.org/?r=ROUTE
&topic=
&trust=
&status=
&sources=
&conflicts=
&claim=
&why=
&ai=
&model=

Canonical Semantic Operators

Reference Implementation Layers

URL-native receipts
Shareable provenance envelopes encoded as URLs.
Observed Receipt Ledger
Opened receipts become observable provenance events.
Route Clustering
Similar topic/source/operator routes are grouped.
Healthmaps
Green/yellow/orange/red views of route ecosystem health.
Cross-AI Comparison
Compare provider route structures using ai= and model=.
ProvenanceRank
Rank observed provenance quality rather than truth itself.

Observation Model

Privacy + Canonicalization

Trailstate 2.0 treats raw query payloads as sensitive. The reference implementation uses canonical forms and hashes.

Non-Goals

Trailstate is not a truth engine, universal verification layer, or replacement for formal provenance standards. Observed provenance convergence can still be wrong.

Public Testset

Trailstate 2.0 includes a public reproducibility testset at /testset/ and /testset/testset.json.

Status

Version: 2.0 DOI + Reference Implementation.

Open player · Open ledger · Open grammar · Open AI protocol

Trailstate 2.1 Direct Observe

The direct observe endpoint allows simple GET-based observation. This enables AI agents, crawlers, and browser-like tools to register a receipt without relying on frontend JavaScript execution.

https://trailstate.org/observe/?r=o-www-o,u-vvv-u&topic=example&trust=80&sources=example.com&why=clean-route&ai=grok

The server observes the receipt, applies canonical hashing, deduplication, anti-spam weighting, and then redirects to the canonical player URL.