Pattern Proposal: Hierarchical File-Backed Knowledge Store

Summary

Directory-level separation of global governance, project-specific overrides, runtime artifacts, and templates directly in the Git tree.

Candidate Pattern

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

Observed Signals

No specific signals listed.

Evidence

Supporting Evidence

• cas-knowledge/global/ - Holds organization-wide decisions, governance, models, patterns, rules, and signals.
• cas-knowledge/projects/ - Holds project-level contextual models and architectural assertions.
• cas-knowledge/runtime/ - Maintains execution profiles, evaluations, and runtime traces.

Scope Assessment

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

Rationale

• Intent: Treat architectural knowledge and governance policies as version-controlled code artifacts without an external database.
• Context: Continuous architecture governance relies on versioned decisions, rules, and metrics distributed across projects.
• Force: Need version control, diffing, and PR-based approvals for architectural governance.
• Force: Global organizational policies must coexist with project-level exceptions and runtime traces.

Traceability

Artifact source: proposed-patterns