palimpsest-plasma is the official governance automation engine for the Palimpsest-MPL ecosystem. It is an OCaml-based system that interprets the licence, exhibits, and governance rules as typed, machine-readable policies, and evaluates real-world repository states against those obligations.
PLASMA stands for the operational, programmable substrate that keeps the Palimpsest-MPL ecosystem correct, compliant, and narratively coherent over time.
-
Validate SPDX headers, provenance manifests, exhibit references, governance metadata, and release requirements
-
Detect violations, omissions, inconsistencies, and structural drift
-
Produce actionable findings for maintainers and auditors
-
Suggest or apply fixes (missing headers, outdated links, incorrect exhibit references)
-
Adapt to structural changes in the repository
-
Improve documentation, governance artefacts, and provenance flows
-
Enforce Council decisions
-
Track exhibit lifecycle changes
-
Validate versioning rules
-
Ensure governance processes are followed
-
Parse and evaluate obligations, prohibitions, permissions, and conditions
-
Support versioned policy schemas with migrations
-
Allow exhibits to extend or modify rules
-
Generate structured audit logs
-
Produce compliance reports
-
Support legal, governance, and provenance reviews
OCaml core for stability, correctness, and long-term maintainability. The engine is structured in three layers:
-
core/ — Canonical PLASMA substrate: Policy AST, schemas, evaluation, migrations, facts, findings, actions, governance runtime
-
integration/ — Surfaces: CLI, git hooks, CI, daemon
-
adapters/ — IO and environment-specific collectors/parsers: SPDX, exhibits, repo topology
See docs/architecture.adoc for the full design, docs/policy-ast-v0.1.adoc for the typed AST specification, and TOPOLOGY.md for a visual architecture map.
The MVP v1 bundle provides a deployable PMPL-1.0 experience:
-
Canonical license tooling —
LICENSEtext, ECOSYSTEM mapping, and badges aligned with the Palimpsest Stewardship Council’s PMPL-1.0 release -
Badge & documentation assets —
assets/badges/pack anddocs/mvp-v1.adoc -
Compliance readiness — SPDX metadata, automated checks, audit commands
-
Audit/playback support —
pmpl-verify/pmpl-auditprovenance verification
See docs/mvp-v1.adoc for the full deliverables checklist and compliance commands.
Compliance guidance builds through a local Elixir mix project at site/. Run
mix site.build from that folder to regenerate site/_site. The GitHub Actions
workflow in .github/workflows/nimble-site.yml deploys the generated pages.
This project is licensed under the Palimpsest-MPL License 1.0 (PMPL-1.0). Use SPDX identifier PMPL-1.0-or-later in file headers and metadata.
See LICENSE for the full legal text.
Jonathan D.A. Jewell (hyperpolymath) <j.d.a.jewell@open.ac.uk>
