Agent Decision Record
The structured record of a single consequential agent action, sufficient to reconstruct it: the authority under which it was taken, the agent and model state that took it, the evidence available at the time, the reasoning trace, the action committed, and the oversight conditions evaluated.
Why it matters
Reconstruction, not logging. Composes with what already exists rather than replacing it — the trace is OpenTelemetry, the order reference is FIX, the data lineage is OpenLineage. What is missing is the semantic layer binding them, which is the whole proposal.
This term is a QIS Canonical Extension. It does not currently appear in the Model Context Protocol specification, the A2A specification, the AIEOG Shared AI Lexicon, or any instrument in our standards register. We are proposing it because we have documented the gap it fills, and we label it as ours everywhere it appears. Adopt it, argue with it, or ignore it — but do not cite it as industry consensus, because it is not.
What it is not
These are routinely confused with Agent Decision Record. The distinctions are not pedantic — each one has consequences for how a system is governed.
A trail establishes sequence. A decision record establishes sufficiency — that everything needed to re-derive the decision was captured.
A trace records the call chain. It does not record model version, memory state, or the authority in force.
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. |
consumes | Audit Trail | The subject takes the object as an input. |
requires | Authority Grant | The subject imposes the object as a precondition. |
dependsOn | OpenTelemetry | The subject cannot function correctly without the object. |
Record
| Canonical identifier | QIS-TERM-00021 |
| Status | QIS Canonical Extension |
| Adoption | Experimental |
| Domain · Layer | Auditability · Governance |
| Origin | QIS Canonical Extension. Proposed to fill the gap between an execution record, which FIX already carries, and a decision record, which nothing carries. |
| Semantic aliases | None recorded. |
| First published | 2026-08-02 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-02 · 180-day cycle |
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