SILT Core
Semantic infrastructure for plural encounters.
SILT is portable semantic infrastructure for plural encounters.
In plainer terms, it is a way of building digital systems so that people, communities and institutions with different ways of organising authority, identity and relationships can understand each other well enough to interact, without any of them having to become like the others.
Digital systems increasingly bring people, collectives, institutions and machines into encounters across different legal, cultural, customary, private, institutional and technical orders.
Most infrastructure can identify actors, verify credentials, authenticate keys and execute rules. It is much less capable of representing the relational conditions that give an action meaning: where Standing comes from, by what Authority someone acts, what has been consented to, what another party may rely upon, and what obligations persist.
SILT Core provides a semantic architecture for this missing layer.
SILT Core v0.2 centres on a simple movement:
Source → Standing → Presentation → evaluation at the encounter
A Participant does not arrive as a blank account waiting for a system to define them. They arrive from somewhere, carrying relationships, Standing, Authority and obligations grounded elsewhere.
For a particular encounter, only the minimum relevant projection needs to become legible.
Mutual legibility without ontological collapse.
Where SILT sits
Most digital systems ask:
Who is this?
What can they prove?
What are they permitted to do?
What can the system execute?
SILT addresses a different layer:
What does this Participant bring into this encounter, from what Source, with what Standing and Authority, and under what conditions may the action proceed?
Standing is relational. It may arise through recognition, relationship, office, collective process, agreement or other Source-grounded conditions. SILT does not assume that every Participant derives legitimacy from the same issuer, institution or legal order.
SILT does not replace identity, credential, policy or execution systems. It provides a semantic layer through which different systems can encounter one another without first agreeing on a single model of identity or Authority.
Why this matters
Digital systems increasingly connect people, collectives and institutions whose Standing arises from different legal, cultural, customary, relational and technical orders.
These encounters rarely take place on neutral ground.
Most digital infrastructure recognises Participants through a narrow set of familiar forms: the individual account, the credential holder, the state-issued identity or the incorporated legal person.
These forms may be valid within their own systems. Problems arise when they are treated as the only forms through which a person or collective can become legible.
Standing grounded in relationship, collective recognition, place, history, obligation or living Authority may then be flattened into a credential or severed from the Source that gives it meaning. What cannot be translated into the receiving system’s categories may be treated as absent, informal or invalid.
A credential may therefore be technically valid while the Standing behind it is no longer current.
A collective may recognise a representative through its own relationships and processes, while another institution applies different conditions for accepting that representation.
Two orders may encounter the same claim differently without either becoming universally authoritative.
An AI agent may possess the capability to act without having the Authority to do so.
These are not simply authentication problems. They concern whose categories become infrastructure, whose Standing becomes recognisable, and what meaning is lost in the act of translation.
SILT begins from a different premise: Participants should not have to surrender their sources of meaning in order to interact.
It makes the minimum relevant relational conditions legible at the encounter while allowing different orders to remain different.
What it is
SILT Core is a technology-agnostic semantic architecture for expressing relational Standing and the conditions surrounding legitimate digital action.
Its core concepts include Source, Standing, Presentation, Authority, Consent, Reliance, Obligation, Action, Attribution and Revocation.
A Presentation is the bounded, present-tense way a Participant brings relevant Standing into a particular encounter.
A Profile Expression provides encounter-relevant conditions for evaluation without claiming to represent or exhaust the legal, customary, cultural, relational, contractual or institutional order from which those conditions arise.
More than one Profile Expression may apply to an encounter. They may align, overlap or conflict. SILT does not silently merge or rank them.
SILT is deliberately semantically thick and operationally thin.
Interoperability
SILT Core is designed to complement existing identity and coordination frameworks rather than replace them.
DID and VC systems can carry identifiers and attestations.
Capability systems can express technical permissions.
Wallets can sign.
DAOs can coordinate.
Policy engines can authorise.
Smart contracts can execute.
SILT preserves the semantic thread across these systems:
Source → Standing → Presentation → encounter
This allows technical and institutional systems to interact while leaving the underlying sources of Authority, relationship and meaning where they belong.
Semantic hand-off, not semantic surrender.
Cryptographic and programmable systems
Cryptographic systems are very good at proving control.
A wallet signature proves that a key signed.
A multisig proves that a threshold was met.
A smart contract proves that code executed according to its rules.
But control is not the same as Authority, and technical capability is not the same as Standing.
SILT provides a semantic layer for expressing the relational conditions behind those acts: Source, Standing, capacity, Authority, Consent, Reliance and Revocation.
The cryptographic system may execute the action.
SILT helps preserve what the action means.
AI systems
AI systems increasingly operate as delegated participants within digital environments.
They can initiate workflows, transact, coordinate and generate further actions through other agents and systems.
The central question therefore becomes:
Under what Authority are they acting?
SILT does not attempt to make AI agents into persons.
It provides a way to preserve Authority lineage, scope, Attribution, Reliance, Obligation and Revocation as action moves across humans, institutions and machines.
An agent with a wallet is not the same thing as an agent with Standing.
What SILT Core is not
- A wallet, identity application or credential issuer
- A blockchain protocol
- A universal identity model
- A universal legal ontology
- A universal authorisation or policy engine
- A replacement for DID, VC or capability systems
- A conflict-of-laws system or universal adjudicator
- A universal method for defining personhood, collective representation or cultural legitimacy
- A replacement for courts, arbitration, institutional governance or community decision-making
SILT standardises the encounter boundary.
It does not claim jurisdiction over the systems, relationships or orders that meet there.
Status
SILT Core v0.2.0 was published on 23 September 2026.
v0.2 establishes the settled architectural seam:
Source → Standing → Presentation → evaluation at the encounter
It formalises relational Standing, Presentation, Profile Expression and the surrounding semantics of Authority, Consent, Reliance, Obligation, Action, Attribution and Revocation.
The release was pressure-tested through four base encounters and 30 adversarial variants spanning transferable instruments, credential-carried institutional Standing, plural and collective Profile Expressions, and recursive AI delegation.
The release now provides the public semantic foundation for bounded implementation work while keeping implementation choices distinct from the Core.
Cite this release using its version DOI.
SILT Core v0.1 remains available as the previous public release.
Open infrastructure
SILT Core is developed as open semantic infrastructure.
The Core specification is intended to remain public, implementation-neutral and capable of adoption across different legal, cultural, institutional and technical environments.
Concrete carriers, schemas, validators and implementations may develop around the Core without quietly redefining it.
Different communities and systems may bring different Sources, relationships and conditions into an encounter.
The encounter is shared. The sources of meaning remain plural.