What is DAGR?

A note on naming

GARP, the Governed Analytical Records Protocol described below, names the substrate: the record model, the admission boundary, and the doctrine that decides whether analytical material becomes durable system content at all. DAGR is the current name for the open runtime and adapters that implement that substrate against a real admission boundary, with the Model Context Protocol as its first supported binding. This page keeps the historical GARP protocol vocabulary intact wherever it describes shipped identifiers, schemas, and doctrine, and uses DAGR for the current product and navigation surface.

Definition

GARP, the Governed Analytical Records Protocol, governs whether model-mediated analytical material becomes durable system content at all, by separating drafting, retrieval, synthesis, review, promotion, revision, dispute, and publication into visible record states with explicit transitions between them. A claim does not become knowledge merely because it appeared in an answer, was cached for retrieval, ended up in a database row, or was rendered onto a page.

GARP is not RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation supplies context to a model so it can produce an answer to a query. GARP governs the question of whether the analytical material in that exchange should become a record at all, and on what conditions. The two operate at different layers and answer different questions: RAG asks what context to surface for an answer, while GARP asks whether anything in that exchange has cleared review, source verification, and the admission boundary required to become durable system content.

Core objects

Doctrine

Five lines summarize the disposition that the protocol enforces, paraphrased here for non-developer readers and used elsewhere as compact shorthand inside the implementation references.

Retrieval is not publication.

Synthesis is not canon.

A cache is not knowledge.

Promotion is not save.

Records require custody, lineage, and review.

Admission pipeline

Ingest > Parse > Source Register > Candidate > Evidence Pack > Review > Promote > Record > Digest

Why this matters

A system that only retrieves, generates, and saves cannot answer the question "where did this come from, who reviewed it, and what has changed since it was admitted." GARP makes those questions answerable because admission, review, and revision become governed events rather than implicit side effects of editing or saving, and because the supporting sources, fragments, and review actions are preserved alongside the record itself rather than discarded after the answer is produced.

The six-role namespace map

GARPedia's own checked description of how the roles named across this ecosystem relate to one another. It is written to stay consistent with the layer-map language used inside the DAGR MCP and ARCS Verify repositories, without asserting that this page and those READMEs are the same document.