Requests for Comment

1. Overview

An RFC answers one question:

What substantial change are we proposing, why do we need it, how could it work, and what feedback or decisions are still required?

An RFC is not the same as the other knowledge types it sits next to:

Type	Answers
RFC	What change are we proposing, and what is still undecided?
ADR	What did we decide, and why — after the decision is made?
Roadmap	What is the planned direction and sequencing?
GitHub issue	What implementation work is being tracked?

2. Lifecycle

Draft → Review → Accepted / Rejected / Withdrawn → Superseded

When an RFC is accepted:

• a corresponding ADR is created or updated to record the final decision;
• implementation issues or milestones are opened separately;
• the RFC itself is kept as historical proposal context — it is not silently rewritten to describe the resulting implementation.

3. Index

RFC	Status	Proposal
Publish a Versioned AtlasModel for Search, APIs, and RAG	Superseded	Publish a safe, versioned projection of Core’s normalized model for search, future APIs, and RAG to consume. Superseded by adr.knowledge-api-service, which built a private runtime API instead once a concrete consumer set existed.

4. Candidate Proposals Not Yet Written

These are credible future RFC topics. They are listed here as a backlog, not as pages that exist yet, so this index never links to an empty document:

• Structured glossary model and generated glossary UI
• RAG ingestion and chunking model
• Semantic search and ranking
• Knowledge graph export
• Automated DSL-reference extraction
• Cross-repository validation between Atlas and Ocean-Examples
• Example execution validation in CI
• Multi-language documentation
• Version-aware Ocean documentation

An RFC is written for one of these when a concrete proposal is ready for review — not to retroactively document routine work, and not to fill this index. Several of these overlap with the AtlasModel RFC above; a structured model — now published live via the Knowledge API rather than that RFC’s originally proposed static artifact — is a prerequisite that RAG ingestion and semantic search will likely build on rather than duplicate.

5. Contributing an RFC

Give a new RFC a stable ID of the form rfc.<identifier>, a dedicated decisions/rfcs/rfc-<identifier>.md file, and add it to the table in Section 3 once it is ready for review. A proposal that is not yet ready for review belongs in Section 4 as a topic, not as a half-written document.