Ecosystem evaluations¶
This directory holds Cairn's ecosystem evaluations — design analyses that weigh external infrastructure (candidate plugins, adjacent tools, optional extensions) against the decided architecture (the numbered spec §1–§11 and the Decision log).
An ecosystem evaluation is not architecture and not a decision. It is the why of fit: what an external project is, where it lands in the four-layer model (L0 wire core / L1 enforcement floor / L2 policy+API / L3 UI), which existing primitives it composes with, and what would have to be true for it to attach without compromising the safety floor or inter-node compatibility. Every subject here is an optional extension: a bare Cairn node is a complete EHR without it.
Why a separate area¶
The spec stays a clean statement of what Cairn is; the ADR log stays a clean statement of why Cairn decided what it did. An evaluation of someone else's software is a third thing — what we looked at, and what we concluded about fit — and belongs in neither. When an evaluation surfaces a genuine architectural commitment, that commitment is ratified separately as an ADR; the evaluation only flags it.
Index¶
| Eval | Title | Subjects | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0001 | Agent & messaging plugins | kastellan · localmail | Both fit as optional L2/L3 extensions (three-membrane model); spec unchanged at v0.26; one ADR-0011 refinement parked (skill-epoch as a pinned actor determinant) |
| 0003 | External reference-data sourcing | WHO INN · RxNorm · DailyMed/openFDA · TGA ARTG · PBS · ICD-10/11 · ICPC · Mondo/ORDO | Evaluation. Medicines: INN-anchored substance UUID + public-domain/CC-BY government feeds bundle freely; ATC/DDD, DrugBank, AMH/eTG, SNOMED-AMT excluded; DDI gap real. Disease/injury: ICD-11 ratified as canonical interlingua → ADR-0025 (verbatim codes, offline container, local-terminology overlay); ICPC-3 conditional on its CC variant; Mondo/ORDO (CC BY 4.0) clean substrate; SNOMED/ICD-10-AM/ICPC-2-PLUS excluded. Human-verify items remain. |
| 0004 | Reference-UI framework (the L3 desktop client) | iced (MIT, Rust-native) · Tauri 2 (MIT/Apache-2.0, webview) | Evaluation. Both AGPL-compatible. iced is the more mission-aligned L3 citizen (supply-chain auditability, single-language reviewer-legibility, self-contained wgpu/tiny-skia rendering for the fractal fleet, a stateful Elm model that rhymes with the event/projection record) — recommended conditional on Spike 0004 retiring two EHR bars (accessibility, complex-text/IME) + Pi latency. L3 is plural → a FAIL tips to a webview/Tauri L3, not a defeat. Spec unchanged at v0.40; no ADR (UI tech is below the compatibility boundary). |