Source Authority
Our knowledge architecture assigns source authority according to the fact being established rather than assuming every connected system has equal evidentiary weight.
Systems disagree
A CRM may contain one customer status, a signed agreement another commercial term, and an accounting platform a different financial state. The correct source depends on the question.
Authority is fact-specific
We can model source hierarchy by information class. For example:
- Financial transaction→Accounting / banking record
- Contract term→Executed agreement
- Employee role→Authoritative HR / org record
- Customer commitment→Underlying communication + contract context
This is not a universal hierarchy. The source considered authoritative for one fact may be irrelevant for another. The important capability is preserving the rule explicitly enough that downstream reasoning does not simply accept whichever record was retrieved first.
Conflict handling
When sources disagree, possible handling includes:
- Prefer the authoritative source
- Retain the conflicting values
- Expose the discrepancy
- Reduce confidence
- Request additional evidence
- Route the conflict for review
We do not require every conflict to be automatically resolved.
A visible contradiction can be more valuable than a false single answer.
Authority and freshness
Authority does not eliminate chronology. An authoritative record can still be stale. A lower-authority source may contain newer evidence that should trigger investigation without becoming the final source of truth.
For this reason, authority can be evaluated alongside update time, effective time, provenance, and the specific task being performed.
Downstream use
Source authority can affect retrieval, context construction, deterministic validation, and escalation. A model may synthesize across many records, but the architecture should still know which pieces represent primary evidence, supporting evidence, or unresolved conflict.
The result is not merely a more confident answer. It is an answer whose evidentiary hierarchy is defined before the model turns multiple records into prose.
Authority is not certainty
A source hierarchy determines which record should normally control a fact. It does not prove the source is correct. Authoritative systems can contain bad data, delayed updates, or human-entry errors. A conflicting lower-authority source can therefore be useful evidence that the system of record should be investigated.
This distinction prevents authority from becoming blind trust. For high-value workflows, the architecture can preserve both the governing value and the evidence that challenges it. Downstream reasoning can then state that the authoritative source reports one condition while another source indicates a possible discrepancy.
That is materially different from flattening disagreement into one confidence score.
Scope
This page is the knowledge-layer responsibility: deciding, per fact rather than per system, which source is authoritative when several disagree, and what to do with the conflict once it is identified.
The lineage that makes such a decision possible is captured earlier, at ingest, in Provenance & Source Authority. Carrying the resulting evidence chain through to a conclusion is Knowledge Provenance.