Distinct participants
Humans, agents and services may all participate as nodes, with different capabilities and responsibilities. Treating them as identical employees would erase differences that matter.
Architecture / current direction
Time and knowledge are different problems.
TNT Research treats them as sibling foundations. TNT Time models temporal meaning. TNT Refinery is being designed to govern knowledge and provenance. Sector toolkits compose both into the questions coding agents actually need to ask.
The package map
Foundations below. Domain language above.
This is the intended relationship between components, not a claim that every component is publicly available today.
TNT Time
Related time frames, calendars, changing mappings and histories of what was true and what was recorded.
TNT Refinery
Entities, vocabularies, source identity, provenance, mappings, reconciliation and governed facts.
Markets toolkit → coding agent
Market-shaped questions about sessions, settlement, series, revised data and decision-time evidence.
The toolkit is the intended primary coding-agent interface. A user should not need to become an expert in TNT’s internal model to answer a domain question.
Foundation 01 / in development
TNT Time
“When?” can mean a calendar date, a fiscal month, time since a hire, or a simulation clock. These are related frames of reference, not one clock with different labels.
TNT Time is the temporal foundation under active development. Its design gives those frames explicit mappings, keeps changes and corrections queryable, and flags an answer when a conversion cannot be exact. Planning and simulation problems drove this work. Market calendars, sessions and settlement conventions are domain rules built on top of it.
Foundation 02 / being designed
TNT Refinery
The knowledge question is separate: which entity, source, mapping, transformation and version made a statement trustworthy enough to use?
Refinery is the planned sibling to Time, not a layer hidden inside it. The design direction is governed facts with traceable lineage and explicit reconciliation when sources disagree. A sector toolkit can then ask for evidence in its own vocabulary.
Longer-term research direction
TNT: a substrate for governed work.
Time and Refinery are useful in their own right. The wider TNT idea asks what an organisation could become if shared data, policy and recorded work were its centre of gravity.
Governed authority
Policies, permissions and delegated bounds should describe what each participant may do, and when an action needs a human decision.
Inspectable history
Work, commitments and outcomes should be tied to the information and authority available at the time, so an organisation can learn without rewriting its past.
This is a design thesis to test through working components and examples. It is not a claim that a complete TNT organisational platform exists today.
Status
Where the work stands.
These labels are intentionally plain. Availability, documentation and implementation detail will be published when they are ready to evaluate.
| Component | Current description | Next useful proof |
|---|---|---|
| TNT Time | Temporal foundation under active development. | A reproducible decision-time example in a sector toolkit. |
| TNT Refinery | Sibling governed-knowledge and provenance layer being designed. | Source-aware facts composed with Time. |
| Markets toolkit | First domain-facing interface in progress. | An agent can reason about a market decision using what was knowable then. |
| Wider TNT | Research direction for governed organisations of human and agent nodes. | A working organisational use case built on the foundations. |
Technical conversation
Bring a counterexample.
If a real temporal or provenance problem breaks this model, that is useful evidence. Temporal Club has short, open field notes you can challenge.