SES-019 — Future Development Roadmap and Open Research Problems
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Status and purpose
Status: Draft 1.0 — Forward-looking specification and gap analysis.
This document is not a reverse-engineering report and is not a claim that the reference implementation already satisfies every requirement. It defines the target architecture for a production-grade, provider-neutral Semantic Execution System (SES), identifies the capabilities that remain to be specified or developed, and gives concrete acceptance criteria for future implementations.
The reference implementation may be used as an informative experiment, but the standard is the authority. Where the implementation and this specification differ, the implementation is considered incomplete until it is brought into conformance or the standard is deliberately amended.
Normative terms MUST, MUST NOT, REQUIRED, SHALL, SHALL NOT, SHOULD, SHOULD NOT, RECOMMENDED, and MAY have their usual standards meaning.
1. Purpose
This document is the master backlog for capabilities that should be developed before the Semantic Execution Standard can be considered mature.
Each numbered item below has a stable identifier and a tracked status in the machine-readable gap registry, conformance/known-gaps.json (SES-RM-01 … SES-RM-33, in the same order as the sections below). See SES-104 §4–5 for the tracking discipline.
2. Foundational work
- Formal semantic contract schema.
- Canonical SOG serialization and hashing.
- Formal operation algebra and equivalence rules.
- Deterministic resolution/abstention protocol.
- Authority algebra and delegation model.
- Provenance/attestation format.
- Version negotiation and compatibility rules.
- Versioned Execution IR and verifier.
- Provider capability/fidelity protocol.
3. Security work
- Cryptographic provenance profile.
- Policy freshness/revocation protocol.
- Agent authority and tool delegation.
- Continuous adversarial/fuzzing corpus.
- Cross-provider differential security testing.
- Evidence tamper protection and privacy controls.
4. Scale and reliability
- Semantic cost model.
- Adaptive resource governance.
- Distributed execution lineage.
- Cancellation/backpressure propagation.
- Distributed cache coherence.
- Mutation workflow/compensation profile.
- Concurrency and conflict semantics.
5. Semantic completeness
- Temporal semantics.
- Units/measurement semantics.
- Locale/multilingual semantics.
- Null/duplicate/order equivalence.
- Recursive and correlated graph operations.
- Side-effect and nondeterminism classification.
6. Ecosystem
- Portable conformance vectors.
- Independent certification tooling.
- Provider profiles for SQL, document, graph, search, vector, and hybrid engines.
- Transport profiles for MCP, GraphQL, REST/RPC and future agent protocols.
- Standard governance and change-control process.
7. Maturity gate
The standard should not claim production-grade maturity until every P0 requirement has independent conformance evidence, every critical security boundary has adversarial coverage, and at least two materially different provider implementations pass the portable semantic vectors.
8. Open research questions
- Can authorization-preserving rewrites be mechanically proven for a useful subset of the algebra?
- How should semantic uncertainty be quantified without turning model confidence into authority?
- What is the right portable proof format across independent policy engines?
- How can provider fidelity be demonstrated without exposing proprietary execution internals?
- How should distributed mutation semantics be represented without falsely promising exactly-once effects?
- What is the minimal semantic IR that remains expressive across SQL, graph, search, vector, and document providers?
← SES-018 — AOT, Generated Metadata, and Deterministic Compilation · Standard Index · SES-020 — Formal Semantic Execution Data Model →