Enterprise Model: Versioning and Lineage Specification

Enterprise Model versioning rules, semantic versioning, lineage to research candidates, compatibility guarantees, and deprecation policy.

EnterpriseModel defines the versioning, lineage, and compatibility rules for models promoted from research to production. This page specifies semantic versioning, the version chain structure, backward compatibility guarantees, and the deprecation policy that governs model retirement.

Semantic Versioning

EnterpriseModel versions follow semantic versioning: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH.

Component	Change Type	Example
MAJOR	Breaking change in architecture, tokenizer, or API contract	v1 to v2
MINOR	New capability, non-breaking architecture change	v1.1 to v1.2
PATCH	Bug fix, quantization update, security patch	v1.1.1 to v1.1.2

A major version increment requires full re-validation, security review, and acceptance testing. Minor and patch versions may reuse prior validation results if the change is contained and documented.

Version Chain

The diagram below shows the lineage from research candidate to enterprise release.

Every enterprise version links back to one or more research candidates via Model Lineage. The lineage graph is immutable and auditable.

Compatibility Guarantees

Guarantee	Scope	Duration
Tokenizer compatibility	Same vocabulary, special tokens, and encoding within a major version	Until next major version
API contract	Input schema, output schema, and error codes within a major version	Until next major version
Quantization parity	FP16, BF16, INT8 outputs are deterministic given the same seed within a patch version	Until next patch version

Compatibility guarantees apply only to models served through the official InferenceBackend. Custom backends or patched runtimes are not covered.

Deprecation Policy

EnterpriseModel versions move through deprecation stages before archival.

Stage	Duration	Behavior
Active	Indefinite	Full support, updates, and monitoring
Deprecated	90 days	No new features; security patches only
End of Life	30 days	No patches; migration required
Archived	Permanent	Retained in ArtifactStore for audit; no serving

Deprecation is announced via the model registry API and logged in ExperimentTracker. Clients subscribing to version events receive advance notice.

State Transitions

An enterprise model progresses through the model lifecycle: DISCOVERED, IMPORTED, VALIDATED, REGISTERED, CANDIDATE, EVALUATED, PROMOTED, RELEASED, DEPLOYED, DEPRECATED, ARCHIVED. The transition from PROMOTED to RELEASED creates the enterprise version tag. See Model Registry for the full lifecycle specification.

Integration

EnterpriseModel is managed by DeploymentManager during release and by Model Update Protocol during upgrades. Version metadata is stored in ModelRegistry and lineage is tracked in Model Lineage.