ModelForge/docs/architecture/CAPABILITY_TAXONOMY.md

Capability taxonomy

ModelForge is capability-first: consumers bind to a versioned contract, never to a model or runtime. M9 defines seven estate categories: TEXT, RAG, DOCUMENT, VISION, AUDIO, GENERATION, and ASSISTANTS.

Every manifest declares purpose, input/output modalities, stability, resource class, consumers, privacy class, evaluation type, and bounded payload limits. Runtime state is derived from registry relations and is not confused with declared stability.

Capability	Category	Stability	Evaluation	Resource class
rag.embedding@1	RAG	stable	retrieval	HEAVY
rag.reranking@1	RAG	experimental	retrieval	MEDIUM
document.ocr@1	DOCUMENT	experimental	ocr	HEAVY
vision.embedding@1	VISION	experimental	visual-retrieval	HEAVY
speech.transcription@1	AUDIO	experimental	asr	HEAVY
assistant manifests	ASSISTANTS	planned	llm	EXCLUSIVE_GPU

stable, experimental, blocked, and planned describe governance intent. Operational states such as no deployment, LAB-ready, resident, and blocked are evidence-derived and independently visible through /api/v1/capability-estate.

M10 adds scheduling readiness without changing taxonomy or promotion state. A healthy capability can be WAITING_FOR_CAPACITY, and a cold proven deployment can be READY_ON_DEMAND; neither condition means the capability is broken. Vision and ASR remain LAB promotion-eligible and are not promoted by co-residency evidence.

Project readiness is planning metadata, not an integration claim: ExampleRAG maps to embeddings, reranking and future OCR; ExampleVision to vision embeddings and future OCR/vision assistance; ExampleOps to future general assistance and OCR; Portfolio Assistant to embeddings and a future local assistant.

M11 adds operational identity without changing capability stability. ExampleVision is an active shadow consumer of vision embeddings and an active LAB consumer of speech transcription. Its OCR relation is still planned/blocked. PROMOTION_ELIGIBLE, KEEP_LAB and REQUIRES_MORE_EVIDENCE are evidence states, not new taxonomy values or automatic lifecycle transitions.