Evidence Chain. An ordered, preserved sequence of evidence records that reconstructs how a governed request, recommendation, approval, enforcement action, or delegated action moved from input to outcome. An evidence chain is not just a pile of citations; it carries chronology, provenance, correlation, actor context, policy context, and decision state so the system can replay what happened, defend why it happened, and identify which evidence was missing, stale, rejected, or accepted at each step. An audit record may be one step in the chain or the durable summary that ties the chain to an operation.
Triggering evidence is the local subset of the chain that explains why a specific decision fired.
A preserved derivation is the part of the chain that lets reviewers walk from evidence to conclusion after the original runtime context is gone.