Complete the Data and Context Specification
Understand how to consolidate multiple architectural decisions into a single, implementable data and context specification. Explore drafting clear permission models, retrieval rules, caching policies, and audit trails to support secure and compliant AI systems. Learn to define testable degradation modes, trust boundaries, and review checklists to ensure architecture adherence and operational readiness.
We'll cover the following...
- Define the specification as an implementable contract
- Reconcile internal consistency across sections
- Specify permission-aware retrieval and ACL propagation
- Add trust-boundary notes without a full threat model
- Define context construction rules and degradation modes
- Write the review checklist and sign-off points
- Chapter summary
Every piece has been decided in isolation: the context plan, the retrieval architecture, the packing rules, the permission model, the caching contract, the audit trail. None of that is worth anything to a downstream team until it lives in one document they can actually build against. The deliverable in this chapter is a data and context specification for the cumulative architecture package. Its acceptance criteria are implementability, testability, and enforceable boundaries, not completeness of every possible data source. The decision audience includes architecture review, security and identity stakeholders, and the accountable data owners who approve intended use and access semantics for each source.
A review-ready specification makes a small set of things explicit, so downstream teams can build and verify the same system. It states assumptions and constraints, defines failure behaviors and degradation modes, and links out to any existing ADR for retrieval. It reconciles the chapter’s subsections into a single contract covering Sources and Readiness, Retrieval Choice ADR link, Context Construction Rules, Permission-Aware Retrieval Semantics, Freshness and Caching, Auditability, and Trust Boundaries with Residual Risk.
The following table shows a template view of the specification sections and ...