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Using ALX

Digital artifacts move across applications, agents, organizations, storage systems, and workflows. ALX preserves deterministic identity and declared lineage across each exchange.

Applications represent each artifact as a Block, connect derived work through declared parents, and verify the resulting identities and relationships with public protocol rules.

Block Identity​

Every Block has two deterministic identities:

  • contentHash identifies canonicalized content.
  • blockHash identifies canonicalized content with its normalized declared parent set.

Content changes produce a new contentHash. Parent-set changes produce a new blockHash. The two identities let applications distinguish content identity from lineage-bound Block identity.

Block Lineage​

parentHashes connect a Block to the direct parents declared by the application. Connected parent relationships form a derivation graph.

Applications can traverse available graphs to inspect sources, intermediate results, model outputs, evaluations, decisions, and handoffs associated with a selected Block.

Context for Intelligent Systems​

Verified Blocks can become structured context for subsequent applications and agents.

An application retrieves reachable Blocks, verifies each identity, validates the available graph, and selects the content required for the next operation. Application policy controls relevance, ordering, permissions, context limits, and interpretation.

Use Build Context from Blocks for a runnable workflow.

When to Use ALX​

Use ALX when digital artifacts need deterministic identity, declared lineage, independent verification, or connected context across systems and workflows.

Use Cases​

ALX supports workflows that require deterministic identity, declared lineage, independent verification, or connected context:

  • AI and agent workflows
  • Retrieval-augmented generation
  • Software and release provenance
  • Research data and publications
  • Business approvals, compliance evidence, and audit records
  • Knowledge, document, and digital media systems

A Block can represent any supported application-defined JSON content. Applications remain responsible for semantics, permissions, storage, governance, ownership, and trust decisions.