Graph grouping taxonomy — areas and initiatives

How the project object graph groups features into product/functional areas and bundles cross-cutting work into initiatives. Landed 2026-07-05 on the proposal/project-object-graph line; the remaining projections are proposed in ../proposals/graph-grouping-projections.md.

Companions: ../proposals/project-object-graph.md (the epic), docs/proposals/project-object-graph/seed-objects.yaml (the seed catalog carrying the type registry and data), internal/graph/lint.go (the invariants).

The two axes

"Grouping" conflates two orthogonal things, and the taxonomy models them as separate types rather than forcing one to serve both (the Jira failure mode: epics as both grouping and work):

Axis	Nature	Type	Lifecycle
Structural	stable, near-hierarchical, ownable	area	changes rarely; survives every project
Work	dynamic, cross-cutting, time-bounded	initiative	born, executed, closed

An area is where features live and what a team/lead owns. An initiative (a project) is not a place features live; it is a bundle of changes that crosses areas. Every persona view — portfolio rollup, project status, "what's touching my area", QA coverage — is a computed projection over these two anchors plus the existing typed edges; nothing is stored per-view, consistent with the epic's "roadmap is computed, never authored" principle.

This preserves the epic's anti-containment stance (flat typed DAG, no single-parent trees): membership is a many-edge, hierarchy is a lint-checked acyclic edge, and nothing is a container.

Types and edges

• area (derives from core-node): part_of → area (cardinality one, acyclic: true — cycles hard-fail the generic cycle lint) and owned_by → actor (many). product is deliberately not a type: with one product, the root area (area-kitsoki) is the product; a second product is just another root area.
• initiative (derives from core-node): targets → area (many; a derived-but-cached edge kept honest by lint), includes → change (many), proposals → proposal (many), owned_by → actor (one). Scalars (horizon, priority) live in per-type fields. This adopts the initiative level from docs/proposals/roadmap-portfolio-work.md; goal/wall/epic remain unmodeled until a consumer needs them.
• feature.in_area → area (many). The first entry is the primary area for tree-shaped rollups — a convention, not a distinct edge. A feature that genuinely spans areas lists all of them (the spanning feature is also how an initiative's derived target set stays honest).
• actor.owns_area → area (many). Group-level ownership. The legacy per-feature actor.owns → feature remains valid; it was not retargeted because existing data references features and the registry's target-type check would break.

Invariants (internal/graph/lint.go)

• orphan-feature (hard error): a public feature with zero in_area targets fails lint — including via graph apply, so a changeset cannot introduce an unhomed public feature. Scoped to catalogs whose registry declares feature.in_area, so taxonomy-free catalogs are exempt. Internal features are never flagged (migration stays incremental).
• area-cycle (hard error): part_of is acyclic-marked; the generic cycle lint covers it.
• initiative-scope (opt-in warning via LintOptions.InitiativeScope): initiative.targets must equal the derived set includes → change.implements → feature.in_area. The seed-corpus test runs with it enabled.

Decisions (settled 2026-07-05)

1. Primary area = first in_area entry — convention over a dedicated primary_area edge; zero extra machinery.
2. component deferred — the implementation side of the catalog is too thin to justify it yet; the type name is reserved.
3. Six-area seed cut under root area-kitsoki: agent-execution, observability, media-and-demos, web-experience, dev-workflow, platform-install.
4. No team type — a team, when needed, is an actor (actor_kind: team) with a members edge, not a new node type.

Surfaces

The kitsoki web object-graph viewer's full-graph overlay has a data-driven Group by: area mode (tools/runstatus/src/components/objectgraph/, buildAreaGroupResolver): features bucket under their primary area, areas under their part_of parent, other node types walk one obvious hop to a feature, else land in "unassigned". The toggle only appears when the catalog contains area nodes; the default type-layer grouping is unchanged.

The first real initiative node is initiative-project-object-graph — the epic's own work, dogfooding the model it introduced.