This technical report describes the complete architectural vision of the CANI (Canonical Architecture for Normative Interoperability) ecosystem — an end-to-end system for real-time normative semantic reconciliation in distributed manufacturing supply chains. While the companion paper 1 formalizes and validates the CANI equivalence engine (the Quantitative Equivalence Index Iₑ) as a proof-of-concept in mechanical materials standards, this report documents the broader architectural context from which that engine was conceived: a fully integrated pipeline from industrial data generation at supplier facilities through standardized transmission, structured formatting, normative extraction, SI normalization, ontological mapping, and real-time equivalence computation to production control decision support. The motivation is grounded in direct industrial experience: in globally distributed supply chains, data generated by a supplier's production control system under local normative standards (e.g., GB/T in China, GOST in Russia, JIS in Japan, DIN in Germany) arrives at the receiving party's system as normatively opaque — the data is present, but its normative context is either absent or incompatible with the receiver's reference framework. Current practice resolves this gap through manual expert reconciliation, which is undocumented, non-reproducible and incompatible with the digital traceability requirements of Industry 4.0 architectures. The CANI ecosystem is designed to eliminate this gap systematically. This document establishes prior art for the complete ecosystem architecture as conceived and developed by the author. It is intended to be deposited in Zenodo prior to the submission of the companion paper, creating an immutable, time-stamped, publicly citable record of the architectural vision described herein. The ecosystem concept was originally conceived by the author under the designation PAII (Protocolo Aberto de Interoperabilidade Industrial — Open Protocol for Industrial Interoperability), developed from direct procurement experience in multinational manufacturing environments across Brazil, India, China and the United Kingdom. The formalization of the core equivalence engine as CANI and its scientific validation constitute the first published instantiation of this original vision. The name PAII and the broader ecosystem architecture described herein are hereby recorded as original intellectual contributions of Fernando Machado, with priority established by the deposit date of this document.
Fernando Machado (2026) studied this question.