Eligibility determines what may legitimately enter Attestor evaluation. It formalizes the word eligible in the governing relationship Eligible Governed Inputs → Attestation → Rule-Constrained Evaluation → Trust Statement.
An input becomes eligible because it satisfies the requirements of a particular Attestor evaluation—not merely because it exists, is public, is authoritative, or can be technically retrieved.
Eligibility is Attestor's governed determination that a proposed input is permissible for use in a particular evaluation. It is contextual rather than universal: an input may be eligible for one evaluation and ineligible for another.
An input must be identifiable or otherwise distinguishable enough to be referenced, traced, and reviewed. Anonymous, ambiguous, or unresolvable material cannot be treated as eligible when its identity is material to the evaluation.
The input must have a material relationship to the subject, assertion, scope, or evaluation question. Mere availability, proximity, or mention does not make information eligible.
Material provenance must be sufficient to understand where the input came from and how it reached Attestor. Provenance may be direct, referenced, or derived, but must be adequate for the intended evaluation.
Where authority is material, the source or Attesting Authority must be attributable and its legitimate scope understandable. Authority supports eligibility analysis but does not automatically establish eligibility.
The input must be usable within the scope of the evaluation. Information outside the relevant subject, jurisdiction, condition, time, state, or question may be excluded or bounded rather than treated as generally applicable.
The source state and relevant time must be sufficiently known when they affect interpretation. Superseded, withdrawn, historical, or later-modified material may still be eligible for some purposes, but its state must not be concealed.
The input must be sufficiently intact, resolvable, or reviewable for the evaluation purpose. Eligibility does not require that every source be independently verified by Attestor, but Attestor must be able to understand what material it is actually evaluating.
A proposed input is eligible when Attestor can responsibly admit it to a defined evaluation under the applicable purpose, scope, provenance, authority, state, relationship, and reviewability requirements. These requirements are now represented through governed production Eligibility records and are subject to applicable Schema and Validation controls.
Eligibility is not a permanent quality attached to a source. The same governed object may be eligible for one evaluation, ineligible for another, or eligible only for a limited historical or contextual purpose. Eligibility therefore belongs to the relationship between an input and a particular evaluation.
Eligibility permits an input to be considered. It does not determine how much weight the input receives, whether it supports the assertion, or what evaluation outcome follows. Eligible inputs may support, weaken, contradict, complicate, or leave unresolved the assertion under review.
An input should not enter the governed evaluation basis when its identity or provenance is materially inadequate, its relationship to the evaluation is immaterial, its scope is incompatible, its state cannot be responsibly interpreted, it is materially unusable, or an applicable Attestor rule prohibits its use. Exclusion must not be used to hide material conflict or inconvenient evidence.
Where an input is considered for eligibility but excluded and that exclusion is material to understanding the evaluation, Attestor should preserve enough context to make the decision reviewable. Evaluation and Methodology govern how material eligibility treatment is carried forward into the evaluation basis and later review.
Canonical Suite objects are governed inputs, but their institutional authority does not grant automatic eligibility for every Attestor purpose. Attestor evaluates their relevance and admissibility while preserving the source institution's meaning and authority.
External information may be eligible when it can be governed sufficiently for the evaluation purpose. External origin neither disqualifies nor privileges an input. Attestor must preserve attribution, provenance, authority context, scope, relevant state, and limitations to the degree required by the evaluation.
An Attestation organizes the governed assertion presented for evaluation. The evidence, source references, and other governed inputs supporting or challenging that assertion must satisfy applicable eligibility requirements before they are treated as part of the evaluation basis. An Attestation's existence does not make all of its references eligible.
The first controlled production operation exercised Eligibility as a distinct governed admission decision before Rule-Constrained Evaluation. Six source objects were separately assessed and admitted as eligible governed inputs for the bounded evaluation concerning SC-CERT-2026-0001.
The operation confirmed that canonical Suite status does not itself create eligibility. Each source was admitted because it satisfied the requirements of this particular evaluation. The resulting eligibility decisions did not determine whether the Attestation would later be supported.
Eligibility is an admission decision, not an evaluation result. It does not establish truth, source superiority, evidence weight, structural validity, conformance, publication, or trustworthiness.
Eligibility gives formal and operational meaning to Eligible Governed Inputs. It is the governed admission boundary between potentially available information and the material Attestor may use in a particular evaluation. The first controlled production operation demonstrated this boundary through six separate eligibility determinations before evaluation.
The first-production result does not make any source automatically eligible for a future evaluation. Eligibility remains evaluation-specific and must be determined again when purpose, scope, state, provenance, authority context, relationships, or applicable rules materially differ.
Back to Attestor →