Form families and namespaces

A Form Family is a publisher-defined group of Forms that share a namespace and related semantics. A family is not a package, a release channel, or a compatibility promise. The family model is described by decision 0009; the portable-data rule for every member is portability-boundary.md.

Group identity

The apiVersion in a current FormRef is an opaque, versionless reverse-DNS group controlled by the publisher, for example:

forms.example.com
storage.publisher.example

The group is one identity component. kind, definitionVersion, and schemaDigest complete the exact Form identity. A host and a client resolve the four members together and MUST NOT choose a family, kind, or version by latest, by a built-in list, or by a publisher preference.

There is no official-family roster or central kind enum. Every publisher uses the same package, digest, and contract mechanisms. The only distinction is publisher provenance and the trust policy an operator chooses for it. Takoform does not reserve a namespace, grant an official shortcut, or infer trust from a group name.

The reverse-DNS group is carried as one path segment by Host API v1. A group containing / is invalid; a version belongs in the Form's definitionVersion, not in a second family segment. See host-api/v1.md for the wire path rules.

Exact references

An exact FormRef is:

{
  "apiVersion": "forms.example.com",
  "kind": "ExampleResource",
  "definitionVersion": "0.1.0",
  "schemaDigest": "sha256:<64 lowercase hexadecimal characters>"
}

Changing a Form's desired contract creates a new definitionVersion and digest. Renaming a group re-identifies every member because the group is part of the digest-bound definition. Package digest, publisher policy, Host support, activation, and commercial availability are separate facts and never change FormRef equality.

Resource roles

Every current Form Definition declares one role from a closed vocabulary. Roles describe how a host may reason about a resource; they do not select a backend or grant lifecycle authority.

Role	Meaning	Portable rule
identity	long-lived logical resource	carries no implementation snapshot
revision	immutable implementation snapshot	changes create a new resource
deployment	selection of active revisions	the mutable traffic or rollout path
attachment	connection to an external event or endpoint	deleting it does not delete its parent
policy	independently changed operating rules	does not become parent identity

Outward capability use is represented by a typed Binding held by the resource whose contract declares it. Inward activation is represented by an attachment that points at the activated resource. A Form publisher may define additional relationships through the closed relation and Binding vocabulary, but a family does not turn those relationships into a universal graph language.

Host support

The publisher owns a Form Definition and its portable semantics. A host chooses which exact Forms, Interfaces, and Bindings it has installed and which operations it can support. A host MAY support a subset of a family and MUST advertise or refuse that exact subset according to its own support policy; a family name does not imply support.

The Snapshot compiler accepts zero or more publisher-supplied packages and exact contract documents. This is intentional: compiling an empty family set proves that the model has no hidden family roster. Generic artifact conformance uses synthetic reverse-DNS groups and is independent of any publisher's catalog.

Compatibility

Occupied versioned groups remain readable only under their exact historical identities. They are not current family namespaces and MUST NOT be reused for new semantics. versioning.md defines the shared retention and non-reuse rules.

A family groups related Form contracts; it does not combine them into one package or select a Host implementation, client schema, credentials, placement, capacity, pricing, or a backend.