Ontology

Surfaces, channels, and modalities

A surface is the unit of composition — any reader-facing artifact the firm produces, from a research note to a documentation page like this one. The closed set of surface templates is declared in @vaquum/surface/templates and imported wherever a surface must be typed. A surface is received through two channels and composed from five content forms. The channels are face and voice; the forms are text, diagram, table, input, and record. These two axes are orthogonal: every element sits in exactly one modality, and both channels govern every element at once.

A well-composed surface feels inevitable, the way a well-proofed page from a central-bank quarterly feels inevitable. Every upstream decision is settled before the surface is composed, and the surface is what remains of that settlement.

The five modalities

Every element on every surface is an instance of exactly one modality. The modalities form a closed set of five: these are the only forms content can take on any Vaquum surface. Each has its own internal grammar, and each renders meaning into a different register: text reaches the reader as language; diagram as structure or quantity; table as relation; input as intent; record as witness.

modality	meaning	closed set
text	meaning as language	14 atoms
diagram	meaning as structure or quantity	17 atoms
table	meaning as relation	—
input	meaning as intent	—
record	meaning as witness	—

The closed set for each modality is declared under substrate/modalities/ in the code tree. Text and diagram enumerate their atoms in full. Table, input, and record carry their rules but have not yet fixed their closed sets; the count column will fill in as those modalities stabilise.

Channels

Face is what the eye receives — the pre-cognitive register of the surface, felt in the first half-second before any content is read. Voice is what the inner ear hears as the eye reads — the register the reading mind runs when it pronounces the words on the page. The inheritance for both is the same: Swiss institutional publishing, central-bank working papers, the BIS Quarterly, and the New York Subway graphic standards of the 1960s.

The channel axis is orthogonal to the modality axis in the system’s ontology. Each of the five modalities — text through record — carries face and voice simultaneously, without exception. The table above is itself an instance of the table modality being described in this section. Face governs its hairline rules, its mono column headers, and the tabular alignment of its numerals. Voice governs its exacting column labels and the claim-first shape of its header row.

Determinism

A surface is deterministic when every parameter carries a declared value the rendered output can be checked against. This page declares its eight face values and eight voice values in frontmatter. The validator reads the declaration, runs the rules against the prose and the rendered surface, and reports any drift. The closed sets are closed because the linter holds them closed.