Metadata for records describes the business context, relationships among records and systems, relationships to legal and social contexts and to the agents who create, manage and use them. Some metadata is fixed when the record is captured; further process metadata builds up through later use and handling, together forming the record's provenance. Metadata is itself managed as a record, protected from loss or unauthorised deletion, retained or destroyed per appraisal, and under access rules. A record must carry a content description, structure, business context, relationships, retrieval identifiers and a history of business actions and events with dates, times and agents; records without such metadata lack authoritative status. Metadata is documented in schemas.
The graph holds this control, the 0 it maps to, and the evidence behind each claim, over MCP and REST.