Tag Governance Workbench

Status: Working guidance for Phase 2 governance UI.

Authoring Tags

• Prefer lowercase kebab-case for plain tags, for example semantic-search.
• Prefer namespaced tags when the value has structure or lifecycle meaning, for example kind:decision, review-after:2026-06, or superseded-by:memory-id.
• Use the memory editor tag chips to add, remove, and autocomplete tags. Suggestions are completions only; they do not rewrite existing records.
• Keep broad labels out of routine authoring. Tags such as general, misc, notes, or todo are low-signal and should become blocklist or alias candidates.
• Treat alias suggestions as approval-required cleanup work. Add the alias to policy or edit affected records intentionally; the system does not apply tag rewrites automatically.

Interpreting Warnings

• Info diagnostics are observed policy feedback. They can be saved unless another validation rule blocks the record.
• Warning diagnostics identify policy drift, missing relationships, source-link problems, or stale lifecycle tags. They should be reviewed before relying on the memory in retrieval or chat context.
• Error diagnostics are blocking. In blockUnknown plain-tag mode, unknown or blocklisted plain tags must be changed or added to policy before the record can be saved.
• The Tag Manager Policy Feedback panel reports invalid editable policy lines, duplicate namespace definitions, and suggestions derived from observed tag usage.

Policy Modes

• allowWithSuggestions: unknown plain tags are allowed and surfaced as informational suggestions.
• observe: unknown plain tags are recorded as informational diagnostics.
• warn: unknown plain tags remain saveable but show warnings.
• blockUnknown: unknown or blocklisted plain tags emit blocking errors during memory create/update.

Approval Model

The suggestions table is intentionally read-only. Casing variants, near duplicates, low-value tags, broad tags, namespace mistakes, and allowlist candidates are evidence for a human policy edit or memory cleanup pass. The application should not automatically merge, delete, or rename tags without explicit approval.