Pattern Proposal: Declarative Hierarchical Knowledge Store

Summary

Organizes domain governance rules, architectural decisions, and runtime state into a structured, dual-tier filesystem tree.

Candidate Pattern

• ID: declarative-hierarchical-knowledge-store
• Classification: architectural
• Maturity: strategic_direction
• Type: emerging

Observed Signals

No specific signals listed.

Evidence

Supporting Evidence

• cas-knowledge/global/ (decisions, governance, maps, models, narratives, patterns, rules, signals) - Global domain definitions and enterprise architectural guardrails.
• cas-knowledge/projects/ (ideas-to-life-cas, ea4all-agentic-build) - Project-level architectural steering workspaces.
• cas-knowledge/templates/ (architecture_decision_record_template.md, rule_template.md) - Standardized Markdown schemas enforcing artifact consistency.

Scope Assessment

• Evidence Strength: high
• Confidence: high
• Applies to: ideas-to-life-cas

Rationale

• Intent: Provide version-controlled, human-readable, and machine-parsable storage for enterprise and project-level architectural rules.
• Context: Architectural steering requires durable persistence that supports GitOps workflows, pull-request reviews, and cross-project inheritance.
• Force: Governance decisions and rules must be versioned alongside codebase history.
• Force: Separation is required between global enterprise rules and project-specific variations.
• Force: Artifacts should be human-readable Markdown/YAML.

Traceability

Artifact source: proposed-patterns