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Extension Schema Design

Status: Work in progress. This document is a placeholder for a future design effort. It is not an authoritative specification of Extension Schema behavior.

Intended scope

This document will define the universal rules governing schemas that extend types owned by MAP Core or by another extender. Its intended concerns include:

  • cross-schema ownership and identity;
  • legal extension and reference relationships;
  • schema dependencies and binding;
  • compatibility, conflicts, and evolution; and
  • the boundary between universal extension rules and component-specific use.

Until those rules are designed and accepted, the schema design specification governs only the common Schema 2.0 structure. The documents under adaptive systems preserve important extension use cases, but they are not the general authority for Extension Schema semantics.

No implementation should infer unsettled extension behavior from this placeholder.

The common structural baseline is nevertheless settled: versioned schema DependsOn relationships form a DAG, and every direct cross-schema descriptor reference requires a direct dependency on the target schema version. The future Extension Schema design must build its ownership, compatibility, and evolution rules on that baseline rather than reintroducing dependency cycles.