Governing Generative Relational Public Knowledge: Provenance, Process Justice, and Institutional Authority

Generative relational knowledge infrastructures preserve the contributions, evidence, interpretations, and decisions through which public accounts develop. Their governance consequently concerns relations and processes as well as final artifacts. This paper develops a jurisprudential framework that differentiates historical occurrence, evidentiary reconstruction, institutional recognition, legal consequence, and the powers exercised over their recorded representations. The method combines normative argument, a purposive scholarly review, scoped primary-law analysis, comparative institutional reasoning, and constructed case decisions. The framework connects authority to a specified source, operation, affected relationship, and reviewable mandate. It develops process justice, graduated permissions, prospective supervisory duties, distributed responsibility, and effective correction. Provenance supports recognition and accountability while requiring an independent justification for downstream control; conceptual priority, dependence, independent development, dissociation, and governing office retain distinct roles. Information-lifecycle analysis permits qualified disclosure and justified loss of historical completeness. A hypothetical EU-established nonprofit repository supplies a bounded legal stress test, with national-law and deployment-specific questions identified separately. Worked cases examine contested evidence, restricted sources, intellectual genealogy, AI-mediated reuse, community authority, and requests to retire identifying records. A proposed charter and decision structure make the institutional commitments concrete for further review. The contribution is a reasoned governance framework whose normative, legal, technical, and empirical claims remain distinct. Institutional legitimacy and corrective effectiveness require further participatory and comparative assessment; neither follows from the existence of an auditable record or a formally completed procedure.