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This paper introduces ContextNext, a formalized context governance framework that enhances the reliability of knowledge retrieval for autonomous AI agents by ensuring provenance, integrity, and traceability. The framework employs a combination of typed Markdown documents, deterministic selectors, and SHA-256 hash-chained version histories to verify the quality and eligibility of knowledge artifacts before they are retrieved. Empirical results show that ContextNext outperforms traditional retrieval methods like BM25 in both answer quality and retrieval determinism, indicating its effectiveness in addressing critical failure modes in existing systems.
Context governance can elevate AI retrieval systems by ensuring that only verified, high-quality knowledge is utilized, outperforming traditional methods in both quality and consistency.
Autonomous AI agents increasingly depend on external knowledge stores, yet most retrieval pipelines provide relevance without durable guarantees of provenance, version identity, integrity, traceability, or point-in-time reconstruction. We formalize this as context governance and present ContextNext, an open specification and reference implementation for governed AI-consumable knowledge vaults. ContextNext does not replace Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG); it supplies the governance layer beneath retrieval, determining which artifacts are approved, current, attributable, and integrity-verified before retrieval systems operate over them. The specification combines typed Markdown documents with metadata, deterministic set-algebraic selectors, contextnest:// URI references, SHA-256 hash-chained version histories, graph-level checkpoints, source nodes for live data through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and audit traces of agent context consumption. These mechanisms let organizations reconstruct which knowledge versions informed an agent output and whether those versions were AI-eligible when consumed. We report first empirical results from two controlled experiments. In a stale-version attack isolating the governance-versus-retrieval failure mode, governed selection strictly Pareto-dominates BM25 sparse retrieval, with higher answer-quality pass rate (97% versus 93-90%) at about one-third the input-token cost. In a retrieval-determinism experiment over a 1,060-document corpus, deterministic selectors and BM25 return stable document sets across repeated identical queries (Jaccard 1.0), while a dense+HNSW baseline is non-deterministic on 80% of queries (mean Jaccard 0.611, worst case 0.210). These results suggest that context governance addresses failure modes retrieval quality alone is not designed to resolve. We release a core engine, CLI, and MCP server under open licenses.
