Generative Relational Public Knowledge Infrastructure: Social Facts, Knowledge Evolution, and Institutional Justice

Public knowledge infrastructures shape the conditions under which accounts become intelligible, credible, contestable, and reusable. Their design therefore concerns the organization of social and institutional relations as well as the preservation of artifacts. This paper develops a generative relational account of public knowledge infrastructure in which the trajectories of claims, evidence, interpretation, contribution, and institutional decision remain addressable for continued inquiry. The argument distinguishes historical occurrence, recorded description, attributed assertion, evidentiary warrant, and institutional consequence. It connects these distinctions to epistemic, procedural, distributive, and recognition-based concerns, and examines legal constraints on personal information, retention, attribution, and reuse. The method combines conceptual reconstruction, an interdisciplinary literature review, normative argument, scoped legal analysis, and constructive architectural modeling. The resulting proposal organizes representation and processing around domain-extensible records, temporal histories, controlled disclosure, contestation, and governed transitions across autonomous custodians. It also specifies institutions for authority, representation, review, maintenance, and succession. AI mediation provides a consequential setting in which source selection, synthesis, adoption, and recursive reuse can alter the public status of a claim. Analytical cases examine conflicts among preservation, participation, privacy, attribution, and institutional action. The contribution is an integrated account of the public purposes and design conditions of knowledge infrastructure, with explicit limits on historical reconstruction and technical guarantees. A bounded formal-language package supports representational precision; institutional legitimacy and empirical usefulness require further participatory and comparative evaluation.