Rationaleaddress

Rationaleaddress is a term used in discussions of decision provenance and explainable systems to denote a digital artifact or identifier that encodes or points to the justification for a decision, action, or policy. The concept combines "rationale" with "address" to emphasize that the justification is associated with a specific decision and can be retrieved, inspected, or verified.

A rationaleaddress may be stored directly as structured data attached to a decision record, or it may reference a separate document or data store. Common components include a narrative justification, data or evidence cited, applicable rules or policies, participating actors, timestamps, and version history. Formats vary, with JSON-LD, RDF, or plain text used in different systems.

Storage approaches differ: on-chain storage for immutability and auditability, off-chain storage with cryptographic hashes to anchor integrity, or hybrid models. Access control considerations include who can read or modify the rationale, and whether sensitive information must be redacted.

Applications include explainable artificial intelligence, smart contracts, regulatory compliance, and governance workflows, where decisions must be auditable and contestable. Rationaleaddresses can improve transparency, traceability, and accountability, but may raise privacy concerns and increase data management overhead.

Related terms include provenance, justification, and decision logs. While not universally standardized, some proposals advocate common schemas or interoperable identifiers to enable cross-system linking and verification of decision rationales.