Audit Trail
The sequenced, tamper-evident record of what occurred, sufficient to establish the order and content of events after the fact.
Why it matters
Financial services solved audit trails for orders decades ago. What FIX cannot carry is why an order was intended — the gap between an execution record and a decision record is exactly where agentic governance lives.
What it is not
These are routinely confused with Audit Trail. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
An audit trail records what happened. A decision record records what the system knew, what it was permitted to do, and under whose authority — which is what reconstruction requires.
A trace is operational telemetry with a retention window measured in weeks. An audit trail is evidence with a retention obligation measured in years.
Relationships
Typed edges into the rest of the ontology. These are what make the canon traversable rather than merely readable.
| Verb | Target | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
addresses | Auditability | The subject speaks to the object as a question or concern. |
dependsOn | OPENTELEMETRY | The subject cannot function correctly without the object. |
relatedTo | FIX | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
producedBy | Tool Invocation | Inverse of produces. The subject emits the object as an output. |
requiredBy | Agent Memory | Inverse of requires. The subject imposes the object as a precondition. |
producedBy | Context Exchange | Inverse of produces. The subject emits the object as an output. |
consumedBy | Agent Decision Record | Inverse of consumes. The subject takes the object as an input. |
relatedTo | Auditability | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
relatedTo | Observability | An association too weak or too general for a stronger verb. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00016 |
| Status | Canonical industry term |
| Adoption | Widely used |
| Domain · Layer | Oversight · Governance |
| Origin | Long-standing in financial recordkeeping; SEC 17a-3/4 and FIX predate agents. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
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