Retrieval Surface

A retrieval surface is what a model can see, which in most deployments diverges sharply from what exists. An organization indexes a repository and then constrains results afterwards, which means the surface is defined by the behaviour of a filter rather than by the contents of the index. That definition is hard to describe to an auditor: the honest answer to "what could this user have retrieved" becomes "whatever the filter would have allowed," which is a statement about code rather than about content. A surface constrained at index time can be described directly — these records, with these classifications, visible to these audiences — and the description is verifiable by inspecting the index rather than by testing the filter. The distinction becomes sharper as the number of distinct user populations grows, because each additional population multiplies the filter conditions that must all hold simultaneously.

Audience and role assignments travel with each record in Centralpoint, so two people asking an identical question draw from genuinely different surfaces rather than from one surface filtered twice. Taxonomy classification narrows further: a prompt scoped to a branch of the hierarchy retrieves within that branch as a property of the index. When someone asks what a given user could have retrieved on a given date, the answer is reconstructable from the record's own classification and audience assignments, together with the version history of the rules that produced them.