1. The open-world design goal

The vehicle universe is combinatorial. Wheels can support a body while a fan pushes against air. A hull can float while a propeller pushes water, a sail pushes against air, or a towline supplies force. One aircraft may roll, float, fly, hover, taxi and fold; one robot may drive, climb a wall and manipulate a valve. The schema must preserve each fact independently and let familiar names emerge from their combination.

A vehicle type is a query result—not the storage model
‘Electric scooter’ can resolve to a type recipe that requires a stand-on or seated personal platform, rolling ground support, electric energy storage, motor torque, wheel-ground traction, and a compatible control arrangement. ‘Fan-propelled bike’ changes the force-generation path while preserving bicycle support and steering. The instance keeps its facts even if the preferred label changes.

#Six substrate principles

• Open world: an unknown class does not make the asset invalid; it can still be described by universal facets.
• Multi-class: one asset may simultaneously match several physical, operational, cultural, commercial, and regulatory recipes.
• Configuration-aware: classifications apply to an exact build and may change after a modification, payload swap, transformation, or coupling.
• Operation-aware: the same build may be crewed, remote, scripted, assisted, or autonomous in different functions and missions.
• Authority- and time-bound: every external class records who issued it, under which rule version, in which jurisdiction, and for what interval.
• Evidence-bearing: measurements and important assertions retain source, method, uncertainty, provenance, and correction lineage.

The kernel stays stable; knowledge grows through versioned vocabularies, recipes, packs, and mappings.

#What ‘fully encompassed’ can honestly mean

It cannot mean that a static document predicts every future leaf name. It means the substrate can represent an unanticipated combination without migration, loss of meaning, or an ‘other’ bucket. The type catalog is a high-coverage seed library. The facet system is the completeness mechanism.