Process Discovery — Overview Narrative (2026-06-04)

A reader-facing explainer of the Process Axis for the knowledge base. Companion content; no source IU edited.

What "Process Discovery" means

The system runs many small operations (DOTs), background jobs, and human workflows. Process Discovery is the effort to recognise which of these are real, multi-component processes — and to make them owned, observable, and governable — rather than leaving them as scattered scripts.

The two axes

• AX-TOPIC organises knowledge by subject (knowledge_graph, architecture, governance…).
• AX-PROCESS organises the same system by what runs: DOT-contained operations, automated multi-component jobs, and human-in-the-loop workflows.

Both are live (CANDIDATE) Layer-1 axes; together they let you ask "what do we know about X" and "what runs to produce X".

How a candidate becomes trustworthy

1. Structural — the components exist (DOTs, jobs).
2. Simulated — a wiring test, clearly tagged, never trusted.
3. Dry-run — a real producer runs against a fixture, a verifier checks it, but nothing is written to production. dot:kg reached a correlated dry-run (producer + verifier, one correlation_id).
4. Real-run — the producer runs for real, under a runtime gate. (Owner-gated; none yet.)
5. Verified — cross-component correlation + real evidence. Only job:cut is verified today.

The discipline: simulated and dry-run evidence never inflate to verified. The verified set is computed, not asserted.

Where it stands (2026-06-04)

• Endpoint executor: deployed, internal-only, compose-managed, fail-closed.
• dot:kg: correlated dry-run done; awaiting owner + real-run.
• job:cut: verified, awaiting owner registration.
• Everything else needing a human: a row in the PROC-OWN decision queue.

Why this matters for content

Content can now describe the system as it actually behaves, citing live evidence (dry-run runs, verified candidates) instead of intentions — and can be honest about what is still a candidate. That honesty is the point of the discovery work.