Recursive-LD is the specification for Layer 3 of the Root-LD traveling context pod — the append-only edge accumulation layer that transforms a flat static entity record into a dimensional knowledge graph node. Every Root-LD document initializes with an empty Recursive layer at mint. Edges accumulate through three distinct phases of population: the crawl mint (zero edges, always), the verification pipeline (owner-declared and Wikidata-anchored edges), and the Bidirectional Corpus Pass (entity-to-entity, entity-to-law, and entity-to-civic-infrastructure edges stamped across the full corpus). Every edge carries dual provenance — the internal Boise Standard knowledge graph node URL and the live canonical external source URL. Population is append-only. No edge is ever removed or overwritten. The Recursive layer grows forever. Constitutional Laws V, VI, and VII govern this specification.
The machine-readable web, as it exists today, is composed primarily of static records. A schema.org JSON-LD block embedded in a web page describes the entity at that URL — its name, address, hours, type. The record is flat. It describes one entity in isolation. It carries no information about what that entity shares with other entities, what laws govern it, what civic infrastructure surrounds it, or where it sits in the broader knowledge graph of the open web.
The Recursive layer is the mechanism by which a Root-LD entity record acquires that dimensional context. Through accumulated corpus passes, every entity in the Boise Standard knowledge graph accumulates verified edges to other entities, to governing law, to civic infrastructure, and to the authoritative external sources that confirm each connection. An AI system or crawler ingesting a full Root-LD document — from the immutable Anchor through the frozen Body to the accumulated Recursive layer — receives verified identity, complete measurement, and a traversable graph of confirmed relationships. The record is dimensional. The entity is a node, not a point.
Recursive-LD specifies Layer 3 of the Root-LD traveling context pod. The complete three-layer architecture is defined at root-ld.org. Layer 1 (rld:Anchor) is the immutable provenance core, sealed at mint. Layer 2 (rld:Body) is the complete measurement snapshot, frozen at mint. Layer 3 (rld:Recursive) is the only layer that changes after mint — and it changes only by addition. Existing edges are never modified or removed.
The path https://root-ld.org/spec/1.0/recursive is referenced in every deployed Root-LD record via the rld:recursiveSpecUrl field. That path resolves to this specification.
This specification defines the structure and behavioral constraints of the rld:Recursive layer, the three phases of edge population, the dual pod stamp requirement for every edge, the four primary edge types and their provenance requirements, and the Bidirectional Corpus Pass protocol. The reference implementation is the Boise Standard verification and corpus pipeline, deployed at boisestandard.org across a corpus of more than 200,000 minted entity records.
Participation in the Bidirectional Corpus Pass is determined by record presence in the corpus, not by verification status. Every entity record in the Boise Standard knowledge graph — verified and unverified — participates in corpus passes. An unverified entity at boisestandard.org/web/entity-com with a crawl-only Body layer receives edges through corpus passes when the pipeline identifies semantic likeness, topology cluster membership, jurisdictional overlap, or schema type neighborhood matches with other entities in the corpus.
Verification determines the richness of the signal available to the corpus pass, not access to the pass itself. An unverified entity presents crawl measurements to the corpus pass: topology fingerprint, schema coverage score, top 40 semantic words, and atomic answer. A verified entity presents all of those measurements plus owner-declared industry classification, boundary declarations, founding narrative, cities served, credentials, and Wikidata-anchored edges from the verification pipeline. The corpus pass operates on available signal. Richer signal produces more precise edges. Both entity types participate. Both grow. The graph builds itself across the full corpus.
The Recursive layer of every Root-LD record is populated through three distinct phases. The phases are sequential for any individual entity but run continuously across the corpus as new entities are minted and corpus passes execute. Understanding the distinction between phases is essential to reading a Recursive layer correctly — the edges present in a given record reflect which phases have completed for that entity at the time of reading.
Every Root-LD record initializes with an empty Recursive layer at mint. rld:edgeCount is zero. rld:edges is an empty array. rld:appendedAt is an empty array. This is the correct initial state. One entity is not a corpus. The Recursive layer cannot be meaningfully populated until there are enough records to compare against. The rld:mintNote field documents this explicitly in every minted record.
Phase 1 applies to all entities regardless of verification status or pipeline depth. The crawl mint establishes the Anchor and Body layers as frozen records and initializes the Recursive layer as an empty, append-ready structure.
For entities that complete the Boise Standard verification pipeline, the Recursive layer receives its first edges at the moment of verification mint. These edges are produced by pass4 of the verification pipeline and reflect two sources: owner-declared relationships (geographic regions served, industry classifications, registry membership) and Wikidata-anchored external knowledge graph connections confirmed by the pipeline.
Phase 2 edges are the entity describing its own position in the world, confirmed by the pipeline. A geographic edge to Boise, Idaho carries the Wikidata QID for that entity if confirmed. A schema type edge to ProfessionalService carries the schema.org canonical URL. A registry edge carries the Boise Standard registry URL. These edges give the verified entity its first confirmed external anchors — points where a crawler can leave the Boise Standard knowledge graph and verify the connection against an independent authoritative source.
Phase 2 edges are declared by the owner and stamped by the pipeline. They are not inferred from corpus comparison. Constitutional Law I governs every Phase 2 edge: the source is declared, the pass is stamped, the timestamp is the record.
Unverified entities do not receive Phase 2 edges. Their Recursive layer remains empty until Phase 3 corpus passes execute.
The Bidirectional Corpus Pass is the primary mechanism of Recursive layer enrichment. It runs across the full accumulated entity corpus — all minted records, verified and unverified — and stamps bidirectional dual-pod edges between entities that meet defined thresholds of semantic likeness, topology cluster membership, jurisdictional overlap, schema type neighborhood membership, or supply chain relationship.
Phase 3 populates four categories of edges that Phase 2 cannot produce: entity-to-entity connections across the corpus, entity-to-law connections linking each entity to the governing statutes and regulations in its jurisdiction, entity-to-civic-infrastructure connections linking each entity to the public institutions, geographic boundaries, and civic bodies relevant to it, and entity-to-information-vertical connections linking each entity to the Boise Standard knowledge pages covering its industry, geography, and service domain.
Every Phase 3 edge is bidirectional. When Entity A receives an edge to Entity B, Entity B simultaneously receives a reciprocal edge to Entity A. Both edges carry the same dual pod stamp: the internal Boise Standard knowledge graph node URL and the live canonical external source URL for each party. Both timestamps are identical. Neither entity's record is overwritten; both are appended.
Phase 3 runs continuously as the corpus grows. Each corpus pass may produce new edges for entities whose records were too sparse in prior passes to cross a matching threshold. The Recursive layer grows throughout the life of the entity record. It does not saturate. Constitutional Law VII governs this phase: the graph builds itself. The record reads the records.
Every edge in the Recursive layer carries dual provenance. This is a hard requirement of the specification. A single-pointer edge — one that references only an internal Boise Standard node or only an external source — is not a conforming Recursive-LD edge.
The two required pointers on every edge are:
boisestandard.org/web/entity-slug profile URL. For law corpus edges, this is the Boise Standard law page URL. For information vertical edges, this is the Boise Standard information page URL. This pointer enables inward traversal of the knowledge graph — a crawler following this URL remains within the verified, structured Boise Standard corpus.This dual architecture is what distinguishes Recursive-LD edges from conventional linked data edges. A conventional edge declares a connection. A Recursive-LD edge provides two independent paths to verify that connection — one through the knowledge graph, one through the authoritative external source. An AI system or crawler entering the knowledge graph at any Recursive-LD edge may travel inward through verified structured data or outward to the live authoritative source. Both directions are always available. Constitutional Law VII governs this: any point in the Root-LD is an entry point into the torus.
| Field | Type | Required | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
rld:edgeType | string (enum) | Required | geographic | industry | schema_type | registry | law | civic | supply_chain | entity |
rld:label | string | Required | Human-readable label for the edge target |
rld:bsNodeUrl | URL | Required | Internal Boise Standard knowledge graph node URL |
rld:externalUrl | URL | Required | External authoritative source URL |
rld:stampedAt | ISO 8601 UTC | Required | Timestamp of edge creation — immutable after stamp |
rld:pipelinePass | string | Required | Pipeline pass that produced this edge |
rld:dualProvenance | boolean | Required | True when both bsNodeUrl and externalUrl are populated |
rld:wikidataQid | string | Conditional | Wikidata QID — required when externalUrl is a Wikidata entity |
rld:provenance | string | Conditional | Pipeline version string — required on verification pipeline edges |
rld:note | string | Optional | Human and machine-readable annotation on the edge relationship |
The Recursive layer supports eight named edge types. Each type carries a different class of relationship and populates through a specific phase or corpus pass mechanism. All eight types conform to the dual pod stamp requirement.
Geographic edges connect the entity to verified geographic regions — cities, counties, states, countries, and supranational regions. Phase 2 geographic edges are owner-declared and Wikidata-anchored where a confirmed QID exists. Phase 3 geographic edges are stamped by jurisdictional path matching across the corpus — entities sharing a confirmed jurisdictional path receive a geographic common edge. The rld:bsNodeUrl points to the Boise Standard geographic region page. The rld:externalUrl points to the Wikidata entity for that region when a QID is confirmed.
Industry edges connect the entity to its declared industry classifications. Phase 2 industry edges are owner-declared. Phase 3 industry edges are stamped when corpus comparison identifies entities with overlapping industry classification, shared schema type neighborhood at the business identity level, or correlated semantic word clusters consistent with a shared industry. The rld:externalUrl on a confirmed industry edge points to the NAICS or SIC classification source, the schema.org type URL, or the Wikidata industry entity.
Schema type edges connect the entity to the schema.org types it declares. These edges are stamped by the verification pipeline at pass4 for verified entities and by the crawl extraction for unverified entities. The rld:externalUrl is always the canonical schema.org type URL. Constitutional Law V governs schema type edges: what two entities share in their type neighborhood is itself a node — the schema type edge is that shared node made explicit.
Registry edges connect the entity to the Boise Standard registry itself and to any other registries in which the entity holds a confirmed record. The registry edge to Boise Standard is stamped at verification mint. The rld:bsNodeUrl is the entity's own profile URL. The rld:externalUrl is the registry's canonical URL.
Law corpus edges connect the entity to the statutes, regulations, and ordinances that govern it. These edges are produced by Phase 3 corpus passes that match the entity's jurisdiction, industry classification, and declared service types against the Boise Standard law corpus — which includes USC titles, CFR sections, Idaho state law, Treasure Valley municipal ordinances, and relevant federal regulations. Every law edge carries the Boise Standard law page URL as rld:bsNodeUrl and the official government source URL as rld:externalUrl. The law source URL is the authoritative government publication — a statute citation, a Federal Register entry, a municipal code reference. A crawler following the external URL may read the governing law directly.
Civic edges connect the entity to public institutions, civic bodies, and infrastructure relevant to its jurisdiction and operations. Schools, public utilities, government agencies, transportation infrastructure, and community organizations within the entity's declared service area are candidates for civic edges. These edges are produced by Phase 3 corpus passes that match geographic jurisdiction and declared service area against the Boise Standard civic corpus.
Entity-to-entity edges are the primary output of the Bidirectional Corpus Pass. When two entities in the corpus meet defined thresholds of semantic likeness — measured across topology fingerprint cluster membership, schema type neighborhood overlap, semantic word co-occurrence, and jurisdictional proximity — a bidirectional entity edge is stamped simultaneously on both records. The rld:bsNodeUrl on each edge points to the connected entity's Boise Standard profile page. The rld:externalUrl points to the connected entity's live canonical domain. Both pointers are stamped in the same operation. Both records are updated in the same corpus pass run. Constitutional Law V governs entity edges: what two entities share is itself a node.
Supply chain edges connect entities through declared product and service relationships — supplier to distributor, manufacturer to retailer, domain to data center to mineral extraction node. These edges are produced by Phase 3 supply chain corpus passes that match declared service relationships, product categories, and procurement data against the full corpus. The supply chain edge type supports the long-arc vision of Boise Standard: a provenance layer that traces from the copper mine in Chile to the semiconductor in Boise to the data center in Kuna to the AI system reading this record. Each step in that chain is a confirmed edge with dual provenance.
The Bidirectional Corpus Pass is the pipeline operation that reads the full accumulated entity corpus and stamps edges between records that meet defined relationship thresholds. It is the mechanism by which Constitutional Law VII is realized: the graph builds itself. The record reads the records.
Each corpus pass runs across all minted entity records in the Boise Standard knowledge graph regardless of verification status. Verified and unverified entities participate equally. The pass reads the Body layer of each record — the frozen measurement snapshot — and computes relationship signals from the available data. Records with richer Body layers (verified entities with owner-submitted data) produce stronger and more precise signals. Records with crawl-only Body layers produce coarser signals. Both contribute to the graph.
The corpus pass evaluates relationship signals across five measurement dimensions. An edge is stamped when a sufficient combination of dimension scores crosses the defined threshold for that edge type.
When two entities meet the edge threshold, the corpus pass stamps both records in a single atomic operation. Entity A's Recursive layer receives an edge object referencing Entity B. Entity B's Recursive layer receives a reciprocal edge object referencing Entity A. Both edge objects carry identical timestamps. Both edge objects carry the full dual pod stamp for the other entity: the Boise Standard profile URL and the live canonical source domain. Both append operations are recorded in the respective rld:appendedAt arrays. The rld:edgeCount field on each record is updated to reflect the new total.
No existing edge is modified in this operation. The append-only constraint is absolute. Constitutional Law II governs every edge: the timestamp is the record.
Law corpus passes and civic corpus passes run as separate operations against the same entity corpus but against different source corpora — the Boise Standard law corpus (USC titles, CFR sections, Idaho state law, municipal ordinances) and the Boise Standard civic corpus (government institutions, public infrastructure, community organizations). These passes match entities to governing law and civic context through jurisdictional path, industry classification, and declared service type. Each match produces a law or civic edge stamped with dual provenance: the Boise Standard law or civic page URL and the official government or institution source URL.
Information vertical passes connect entities to Boise Standard knowledge pages covering topics relevant to their industry, geography, and service domain. Each information vertical page on boisestandard.org is itself a minted entity record with a Root-LD document. The pass stamps bidirectional edges between the entity record and the relevant information vertical page records. The rld:bsNodeUrl on each edge is the Boise Standard information page URL. The rld:externalUrl is the authoritative external source that the information vertical page itself cites.
An AI system or crawler that ingests a fully accumulated Root-LD document — Anchor through Recursive — receives the following on a single HTTP request to the entity's Boise Standard profile page:
rld:bsNodeUrl pointers, or outward to authoritative sources by following rld:externalUrl pointers, at any edgeThe record is not a directory listing. It is a dimensional knowledge graph node with a confirmed provenance chain, verified external anchors, and a growing set of bidirectional edges to the corpus of entities, laws, and civic infrastructure that share its world.
The following is the Recursive layer of the 10 Barrel Brewing Co. entity record at boisestandard.org/web/10barrel-com — a crawl-only record that has not passed through the verification pipeline. The Recursive layer is empty. This is the correct initial state for every minted entity. The record is present in the corpus and will receive edges through Phase 3 corpus passes.
{
"@type": "rld:Recursive",
"@id": "https://boisestandard.org/web/10barrel-com#root-ld-recursive",
"rld:edgeCount": 0,
"rld:edges": [],
"rld:appendedAt": [],
"rld:mintNote": "Recursive layer initialized at mint. Empty by design. Edges form through accumulated corpus passes — common edges (Law V), uncommon edges (Law VI), topology cluster scores, and jurisdictional and supply-chain edges. The graph builds itself. Constitutional Law VII — Torus.",
"rld:recursiveSpecUrl": "https://root-ld.org/spec/1.0/recursive",
"rld:initializedAt": "2026-06-17T21:32:44.042113+00:00"
}
The following is the Recursive layer of the Boise Standard verified entity record at boisestandard.org/web/boisestandard-org after passing through the full verification pipeline. Phase 2 edges are present: Wikidata-anchored geographic and industry edges, schema type edges, and registry edges. Every edge carries dual provenance. Phase 3 corpus pass edges will append to this layer as the corpus matures.
{
"@type": "rld:Recursive",
"@id": "https://boisestandard.org/web/boisestandard-org#root-ld-verified/recursive",
"rld:edgeCount": 28,
"rld:recursiveType": "verification_edges",
"rld:edges": [
{
"rld:edgeType": "geographic",
"rld:label": "United States",
"rld:bsNodeUrl": null,
/* pending — populates when BS geographic node page is minted */
"rld:externalUrl": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q30",
"rld:wikidataQid": "Q30",
"rld:stampedAt": "2026-06-27T02:50:06.144487+00:00",
"rld:pipelinePass": "pass4_edges",
"rld:dualProvenance": true
},
{
"rld:edgeType": "industry",
"rld:label": "Digital Twin",
"rld:bsNodeUrl": "",
"rld:externalUrl": "https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q25099680",
"rld:wikidataQid": "Q25099680",
"rld:stampedAt": "2026-06-27T02:50:06.144487+00:00",
"rld:pipelinePass": "pass4_edges",
"rld:dualProvenance": true
},
{
"rld:edgeType": "schema_type",
"rld:label": "ProfessionalService",
"rld:bsNodeUrl": "",
"rld:externalUrl": "https://schema.org/ProfessionalService",
"rld:stampedAt": "2026-06-27T02:50:06.144487+00:00",
"rld:pipelinePass": "pass4_edges",
"rld:dualProvenance": true
},
{
"rld:edgeType": "registry",
"rld:label": "Boise Standard Registry",
"rld:bsNodeUrl": "https://boisestandard.org/web/boisestandard-org",
"rld:externalUrl": "https://boisestandard.org",
"rld:stampedAt": "2026-06-27T02:50:06.144487+00:00",
"rld:pipelinePass": "pass4_edges",
"rld:dualProvenance": true
}
/* ... 24 additional geographic and industry edges */
],
"rld:appendedAt": ["2026-06-27T02:50:06.144487+00:00"],
"rld:pendingBidirectional": [
{
"rld:slot": "related_web_entities",
"rld:status": "pending",
"rld:pass": "Bidirectional Corpus Pass",
"rld:note": "Other verified BS entities with semantic connections — dual pod stamped"
},
{
"rld:slot": "law_corpus",
"rld:status": "pending",
"rld:pass": "Bidirectional Corpus Pass",
"rld:note": "USC titles, CFR sections, Idaho state law, municipal ordinances — each edge carries BS law page URL + official government source URL"
},
{
"rld:slot": "civic_infrastructure",
"rld:status": "pending",
"rld:pass": "Bidirectional Corpus Pass",
"rld:note": "Public institutions, government bodies, civic organizations within jurisdictional path"
},
{
"rld:slot": "supply_chain",
"rld:status": "pending",
"rld:pass": "Supply Chain Corpus Pass",
"rld:note": "Supplier, manufacturer, distributor edges — domain to data center to mineral node"
}
],
"rld:recursiveSpecUrl": "https://root-ld.org/spec/1.0/recursive",
"rld:initializedAt": "2026-06-27T02:50:06.144487+00:00"
}
The following illustrates what a Phase 3 entity-to-entity edge looks like after a corpus pass identifies semantic likeness between two entities and stamps bidirectional edges on both records. Both the internal Boise Standard profile URL and the live canonical source domain are present on every edge.
/* Edge appended to Entity A's Recursive layer */ { "rld:edgeType": "entity", "rld:label": "Entity B — Semantic Neighbor", "rld:bsNodeUrl": "https://boisestandard.org/web/entityb-com", "rld:externalUrl": "https://entityb.com", "rld:dualProvenance": true, "rld:stampedAt": "2026-07-01T00:00:00+00:00", "rld:pipelinePass": "bidirectional_corpus_pass_v1", "rld:matchDimensions": ["topology_cluster", "schema_type_neighborhood", "jurisdictional_proximity"], "rld:note": "Constitutional Law V: what two nodes share is itself a node. Reciprocal edge stamped on boisestandard.org/web/entityb-com simultaneously." } /* Reciprocal edge appended to Entity B's Recursive layer — same timestamp */ { "rld:edgeType": "entity", "rld:label": "Entity A — Semantic Neighbor", "rld:bsNodeUrl": "https://boisestandard.org/web/entitya-com", "rld:externalUrl": "https://entitya.com", "rld:dualProvenance": true, "rld:stampedAt": "2026-07-01T00:00:00+00:00", "rld:pipelinePass": "bidirectional_corpus_pass_v1", "rld:matchDimensions": ["topology_cluster", "schema_type_neighborhood", "jurisdictional_proximity"], "rld:note": "Constitutional Law V: what two nodes share is itself a node. Reciprocal edge stamped on boisestandard.org/web/entitya-com simultaneously." }