Canonical concept · WikiSure
Canonical Definition
The single approved, versioned, owner-accountable meaning of a term within a governed namespace.
Definition
A Canonical Definition is the single approved, versioned, owner-accountable meaning of a term within a governed namespace. It carries an owner (a named person, not a committee), a version, an effective date, an approval trail, and an explicit set of related concepts. Any system, document, or AI agent that references the term resolves to this definition; anything else is a candidate, a variant, or drift.
Business context
Without a canonical reference, every team builds its own. With a canonical reference, the cost of alignment moves from N×N (every team negotiating with every other team) to N×1 (every team aligning to one published definition). That is the same economics that made HTTP, OAuth, and ISO standards win.
Insurance example
'Claim event' has a canonical insurance definition in WikiSure: a discrete loss occurrence reported against an active policy within its coverage period. A claims-triage agent, an actuarial model, and a regulatory report all resolve 'claim event' to that one definition — eliminating reconciliation work that previously consumed days per quarter.
Governance example
A canonical definition is immutable once approved; changes produce a new version with a documented rationale, an effective date, and a list of downstream dependencies that must be notified. Versioning prevents 'silent rewrites' — the most common cause of regulatory exposure in definition management.
Related concepts
Frequently asked
- Can a term have more than one canonical definition?
- Not within a single namespace. A term may have different canonical definitions across namespaces (e.g. 'risk' in insurance vs. cybersecurity), but each namespace has exactly one approved version at any time.
- Who can approve a canonical definition?
- Only an Approver or Admin within the tenant's governance model, and only after Steward review. The full role model is described in the WikiSure governance documentation.
- What happens to old versions?
- Old versions are retained immutably for audit. They are not deleted; they are superseded, with a documented effective date and a forward pointer to the new version.