Bridges between vocabularies

No vocabulary covers everything. This page maps the five ways the corpus connects vocabularies to each other and to outside knowledge — from declared edition correspondence to hand-written mapping packages — with a note on how mature each one is.

No commands are needed to follow this page. Each claim carries a status in words with a letter mark; the full legend is on the topic index.

Edition alignment

An align block declares correspondence between two editions of a source, with a relation, a status, and a reviewer. Four maturity facts, kept in sync with the alignment notes:

• Declaration support: the grammar compiles in real packages (S).
• Reading tools: no structural query returns align rows — the links question covers produces, reads, anchored, alias, and subtype only, so do not build tooling that assumes align rows are queryable (S).
• Adoption: broad — over two thousand blocks across dozens of source files observed in the corpus (S).
• Semantic effect: none — the block stays document metadata and never becomes rule content (S).

Hand-written mapping packages

Where alignment exists today, it is an ordinary package of hand-written mapping rules, not generated output — a team convention (T). The precedent maps shared dictionary concepts — places, currencies, countries, courts — to external knowledge-base records. Prefer this pattern when the mapping needs human judgment: it is versioned, pinned, and reviewed like any other package.

Concept catalog

A derived full-text index over compiled packages helps authors find candidate concepts before they coin new ones; it requires a source checkout (I). The catalog never merges semantics — it suggests, and the author still writes an explicit import or mapping. Its command surface offers build, search, candidates, and show operations over the compiled snapshot.

Narrow alignment profiles

A dispatcher runs bespoke, hard-registered bridge modules for narrow pairs: physical quantities against a units knowledge base, and order theory against two proof assistants — experimental (X). Each bridge is custom code for its pair, with its own policy and report schemas. This is the right shape when two formal systems need a precise, verified seam — and the wrong shape for anything broad, where the bespoke cost never pays off.

“Verified” here has a hard boundary: the check runs under a declared interpretation, and semantic equivalence is not proved — the same line the import report format draws with declared_mapping_assumption and semantic_equivalence_proved: false (see the alignment boundary).

Import mapping

External knowledge arrives through versioned import recipes: a recipe pins its inputs and its mapping, and the ingest surface builds or checks it (law ingest check <recipe.json>). This requires a source checkout (I): ingest is absent from the public composition; see Import. Mapping profiles tune how much of the external graph becomes rules versus plain retrievable knowledge. What does not fit stays out loudly: profile reports carry a per-decision status and only accepted entries proceed, and a mismatched recipe is refused with an error rather than coerced silently (I).

A newer source-to-facts mapping contract exists as a schema with no confirmed engine surface yet — schema only (O).

Which bridge to reach for

• Same concept needed by two acts → share one dictionary import; no bridge at all. Counterexample: mapping between two local copies of “country” instead of importing the shared dictionary doubles maintenance and silently forks meaning.
• Correspondence between two existing vocabularies → a hand-written mapping package (T). Counterexample: a type alias cannot join two dictionaries — it only renames one type.
• Correspondence between two editions of one source → an align block. Counterexample: two acts in different languages are not two editions of one source; aligning them asserts a correspondence the sources never made.
• Candidate discovery before coining anything → the concept catalog (I). Counterexample: a catalog hit is a pointer, never an identity claim — it never licenses skipping the explicit import.

What bridges are not

Some subject-matter packages reuse the word “bridge” in their names for ordinary domain rules — tolling rules, identity rules, forensic linkage. Those are regular packages, not mapping mechanisms, and this page makes no claims about them.

Where to go next

• The companion page on local and shared vocabulary covers the dictionaries that mappings usually target.
• The companion page on the audit surface shows how to query who reads what across packages.
• For construct-level detail, see the Vocabulary construct reference.
• For structural queries over links, see LawQL.