Participants and authority

Every actor in a workflow is a participant, whether it breathes or not. That uniformity is deliberate: it is what lets human and machine work be scheduled, attributed, and audited under one contract.

{
  "participants": [
    { "id": "podcast_host", "kind": "human", "name": "Podcast Host",
      "role": "host", "organization_id": "org_studio_media" },
    { "id": "caption_agent", "kind": "agent", "name": "Caption Agent",
      "operated_by": "podcast_host", "organization_id": "org_studio_media" },
    { "id": "publish_api", "kind": "service", "name": "Example Publishing" }
  ]
}

Fields

id and kind are both required — kind is the only required field beyond an identifier anywhere in the entity registries, which signals how load-bearing it is.

kind

The agent / service distinction is the one that matters most. A service does the same thing every time. An agent exercises judgement, which is why it needs an accountability chain that a service does not.

A participant with no organization_id is a third party — an external SaaS, say. That is legitimate and used in practice, but it means nothing in the graph vouches for it. Treat unowned participants as a review signal.

Agent authority

An agent's authority is never ambient. It is a declared edge to a responsible principal:

{
  "id": "agent_dubber",
  "kind": "agent",
  "name": "Localization Agent",
  "operated_by": "s.okafor",
  "organization_id": "org_studio",
  "identity": {
    "scheme": "did",
    "id": "did:web:example.com:agents:dubber",
    "credential_scope": ["read:assets", "write:outputs"]
  }
}

• operated_by names the participant on whose authority the agent acts. It maps to PROV actedOnBehalfOf. The generative-AI profile makes it required for agent executors.
• works_for is the organization-level equivalent.
• identity.credential_scope bounds what the agent may do.

This is what makes "who did this, and on whose say-so" a query rather than an investigation, and it is what makes AI disclosure fall out of the data instead of being compiled by hand. An asset produced by agent_dubber traces to s.okafor and org_studio with no extra record-keeping.

Chains

operated_by may chain — an agent operated by an agent operated by a human. The chain must terminate at a human or organization participant; an authority loop is meaningless, and a validator is required to reject one. See Validation.

Identity

identity accepts a bare string or an object:

Decentralized identifiers (did:) are the intended direction for agent identity, so that an agent's identity is verifiable rather than merely asserted by whoever wrote the document.

credential_scope is a declaration, not an enforcement mechanism. The specification defines where an agent's permitted scope is recorded; enforcing it is the implementation's responsibility. Do not assume a document that declares a scope was executed within it.

Organizations

{
  "organizations": [
    { "id": "org_studio_media", "name": "Example Studio Media" },
    { "id": "org_vfx_north", "name": "North VFX", "role": "vfx-vendor" }
  ]
}

Only id is required. role is an open set — studio, vfx-vendor, broadcaster, service-provider.

Organizations are the top of the delegation chain and the natural boundary for a turnover: cross-company work means edges that cross an organization boundary, which is exactly what a scoped subgraph controls.

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is where work runs. Declaring it is what makes cost attribution and multi-cloud portability properties of the graph rather than of a spreadsheet.

{
  "infrastructure": [
    { "id": "studio_ws", "type": "workstation", "owner": "org_studio_media",
      "apps": ["audacity", "premiere"] },
    { "id": "gpu_cloud", "type": "gpu_compute", "owner": "org_mediasvc",
      "spec": "A100 80GB" },
    { "id": "cloud_platform", "type": "saas_platform" }
  ]
}

A task's ran_on points here. Because capability is described rather than assumed, an engine can match work to a target dynamically instead of relying on hand-routing — the difference between a workflow that runs where it was told and one that runs where it fits.