Business knowledge changes. If a system stores only today’s derived state, the information needed for tomorrow’s interpretation may already be lost. This approach addresses that concern:

Business Uncertainty Tolerance is the ability of a system to operate under incomplete or evolving business knowledge without being forced into irreversible semantic commitments — facts stay durable, interpretations stay replaceable, and architectural commitments stay rare.

Preserve Facts, Derive Interpretations separates durable business observations from replaceable interpretations. Current states can still be materialized, while source facts and provenance remain available so later policies can derive different results.

Facts remain stable while policies derive replaceable interpretations.

How It Works

  • Capture domain facts whose meaning is stable independently of the current classification or rule.
  • Record enough provenance to identify when a fact was known, where it came from, and what it concerns.
  • Derive statuses, classifications, and decisions through explicit policies or projections.
  • Retain policy versions and lineage so historical results remain reproducible.

Failure Modes

  • Facts encode today’s interpretation rather than durable observations, so later reinterpretation still loses information.
  • Teams retain everything “just in case”, increasing privacy and lifecycle cost without adding semantic value.
  • Derived state becomes authoritative while source facts or policy versions become incomplete, making historical results irreproducible.

Verification

  • For a representative sample of at least 100 historical cases, a revised interpretation produces results from unchanged pre-existing facts for 100% of the sample.
  • Reinterpreting the sample modifies 0 source facts and requires changes to 0 original fact producers.
  • For 100% of sampled derived results, the system identifies the source facts and, where applicable, the policy version used.
  • Event Sourcing makes the event history the system of record; a durable business-event journal can preserve facts alongside conventional current-state storage.
  • Defer Binding postpones technical choices; this approach applies the same pressure against premature commitment to business semantics.