Footnotes exist for a reason.
They let a reader separate “this is the author’s voice” from “this is where the claim came from.”
Agents need the same separation, but in a form machines can use.
The mistake most teams make is thinking citation is just attaching a link to an answer. That’s the shallowest layer.
The real citation stack has a few layers:
- A stable canonical URL: something a human can click and understand.
- A machine-readable twin: something a system can parse without scraping.
- Explicit time: `as_of` and ranges, so the citation has temporal meaning.
- Addressable examples: claim IDs or other stable handles, so evidence isn’t just “somewhere on the page.”
- A private resolution path: if you need deeper detail, you should be able to retrieve the exact object behind the public reference through a paid interface.
That last layer is the one most people ignore.
Without it, a public citation is a dead end. It’s a marketing page.
With it, the public layer becomes a doorway: you can cite publicly, then resolve privately when you need to act.
That is the boundary Hanging Context and Synorb are built around: public structure, private depth.