A data store plays a Role, and this is the Role's contract (owner, 2026-10-16: roles played by mechanical Actors "each [have] a contract (responsibilities) that it must perform … those are the skills it can perform"). It decides nothing about what should happen. What it must do is below, and each line is something a test can check.
It is a git repository, reached through the git CLI or a forge's API. It sits
in the Knowledge Graph Data Store lane of
initialize-harness and
complete-initialization. The
Actor reading from it follows bootstrap-kg-navigation;
this skill is the other side of those reads.
<name>.json at the
root, the files it lists, and the instructions at the predetermined path
docs/bootstrap/initialization.md.bootstrap-kg-navigation's three answers (absent,
present, present-but-unreadable) depend on this.needs entry is read from a sibling
checkout, ../<name>/<name>.json, under the same two rules.Bootstrap runs nothing, so the test named in tested-by: lives with the
toolset, at its address. It holds a git repository, read through the git CLI,
to each numbered line above: bytes served at a ref as committed, absent told
apart from an empty file, a sibling's declaration read from beside it, and a
committed declaration read back by a later clone with its author and date.
Deciding whether a location is an instance, which harness to install, or what a declaration means. Those are judgements made in the Bootstrapping Agent's lane, using the files this store serves.