Kontour SurfaceThe open trust format under Kontour's products: claims, evidence, freshness, and gaps in one inspectable shape.

Transparency Capabilities#

Status: first pass

Transparency Capabilities are producer-advertised actions or machine-readable affordances that help a Viewer, Operator, Verifier, or agent inspect and refresh trust state. Surface exposes these capabilities; producers perform the underlying domain work.

Capability Types#

Minimum capability categories:

  • evidence reverification: recheck source state, rerun a test, refresh an observation, or validate an attestation
  • authority reverification: confirm that an actor or system still has authority
  • integrity check: compare current source state with the integrity reference behind evidence or claims
  • evidence access request: ask for permissioned or private evidence
  • materiality review: ask an Operator to review whether a claim is material to a product output
  • dispute or correction: report a challenge to a claim, evidence item, or source

Capability Record#

A capability should describe:

  • stable capability ID
  • capability type
  • producer that owns execution
  • applicable claim, evidence, policy, subject, or claim group scope
  • availability state
  • input requirements
  • expected output shape
  • audit trace or event emitted after execution
  • human label and suggested action text

Surface tools may render or expose the capability through Trust Panel, Console, API, or MCP resources. Surface must not imply that availability guarantees a successful refresh or that Surface performs the check.

Agent Guidance#

Agent-readable guidance may recommend actions such as reverify, ask for evidence, ask a human, surface uncertainty, or do not rely yet. Vertical products and agent runtimes own execution policy and final action decisions.

Current Implementation Names#

Use current field names only where exact technical reference requires them:

  • collectWhen remains a verification policy signal that producers may use to schedule evidence collection.
  • evidence.execution remains a current trace shape for command or MCP tool results.
  • producer-specific capability details may live in metadata until a portable schema is added.
  • MCP integrations should expose the same trust state rather than replace the Open Trust Format.

Non-Goals#

  • no guaranteed refresh
  • no Surface-owned verification service
  • no agent runtime policy engine
  • no certification or approval decision

Source: docs/specs/transparency-capabilities.md