Cascade Invalidation

Propagating a retirement through everything derived from it, transitively, until nothing live is left standing on nothing.

Why it matters in a memory layer

Supersession touches one record. Everything summarised, merged or inferred from it keeps its own invalid_at of None and its own confidence, and nothing in the read path can tell that its evidence is gone.

The propagation has to run to a fixed point, because retiring a derived fact can strand something derived from it. And it has to know which retirements were the derivation — a merge retires the loser by the winner, so a cascade that treats that as broken support deletes correct beliefs on its first pass.

Zero cascaded records is the correct outcome on a healthy store, which is exactly why it must be reported alongside the count of edges that could not be followed. Otherwise a working cascade and a disconnected one look identical.

Connections

Taught in: Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Do not confuse with: Supersession