A Reusable Governance-Aware Evidence Infrastructure for Traceability Applications

Abstract

Traceability applications rarely fail because organizations lack data. They fail because the evidence needed for recall, audit, and compliance decisions is distributed across enterprise systems that were never designed to act as a shared cross-organizational evidence layer. Standards supply event and provenance semantics, and permissioned blockchain platforms supply privacy-preserving exchange, but neither defines how evidence should be admitted, governed, selectively disclosed, and exported. This paper proposes a reference architecture for a reusable governance-aware evidence infrastructure. Its mechanism is record-level governance-state anchoring: each accepted evidence header binds to the hash of the governance policy active at submission, converting governance from an operational background condition into a verifiable property of the record. The architecture formalizes this binding with three invariants, decomposes it into adapter ingestion, governed validation, a versioned governance registry, on-ledger anchoring, off-ledger custody, and export services, and is evaluated analytically through comparison with close prior work, requirement traceability, standards-consistency checks, and scenario-based adequacy. The contribution is not a new protocol or a benchmarked implementation, but a bounded architectural artifact separating shared evidence services from application-specific traceability logic.