Architecture, Epistemic Enforcement, and Empirical Implementation of a Universal Classification System for Sensor-Heterogeneous Environments
Abstract
I present the Modulign Standard v3.0, a Dimensional Address Grammar for Observable Reality (DAG-OR): a formal information architecture that assigns a canonical, permanent, cryptographically-anchored address to any observable phenomenon across any physical scale, medium, realm, and jurisdictional context. Unlike prior coordinate systems — GPS encodes location only, MIME types encode medium only, ISO 8601 encodes time only, and domain-specific ontologies remain incommensurable across fields — DAG-OR provides a unified address tuple that simultaneously encodes domain, subdomain, geographic hierarchy, scale, medium, observer provenance, activity state, temporal context, causal relations, and epistemic grade within a single parseable string.
This paper presents the system's formal architecture, proves its core structural properties — uniqueness, intersubjectivity, non-accidentality, and cryptographic integrity — and reports on a live implementation that has produced 155,334 classified observations drawn from heterogeneous sources spanning seismograph arrays, tidal gauges, ocean buoys, atmospheric monitors, wildfire trackers, space weather instruments, legislative corpora, encyclopedic databases, and human-scale video streams. Of these, 559 carry the ^EVID (evidence-grade) meta-flag, satisfying the system's formal chain-of-custody requirements enforced by database-level triggers implementing Invariant I8 of the formal logic document (Gonzalez 2026b).
The paper's central theoretical contribution is the distinction between structural necessity and procedural obligation. Existing epistemic standards for observation — chain-of-custody requirements, observer competence mandates, classification consistency requirements — are procedural obligations: they instruct conduct, but conduct can deviate from instruction without architectural consequence. The Modulign Standard enforces these constraints structurally: the database raises an EVID VIOLATION exception before a non-compliant record is written. Epistemic compliance is not merely encouraged — it is architecturally necessary. This paper is a demonstration that such a system can be built and run.
Cite it
Gonzalez, V. (2026). Architecture, Epistemic Enforcement, and Empirical Implementation of a Universal Classification System for Sensor-Heterogeneous Environments. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19642557