Implementation Profiles
Essential Profile
The Essential Profile extracts 24 fields that make implicit affective context explicit. Designed for memory platforms, agent frameworks, and AI assistants that need structured emotional signals without therapeutic depth.
Overview
The Essential Profile is the lightweight entry point for EDM adoption. It provides the essential emotional structure your platform can act on — primary emotion, narrative arc, and governance metadata — without the overhead of clinical-depth extraction.
When to use Essential: When you need session coherence and salience-weighted retrieval. Essential artifacts surface what matters emotionally without creating permanent clinical records.
Required Fields
The Essential Profile requires specific fields from four domains. All other domains must be structurally present with fields set to explicit null.
| Domain | Required Fields | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| meta | id, version, profile, created_at, owner_user_id, consent_basis, visibility, pii_tier | 8 fields |
| core | anchor, spark, wound, fuel, bridge, echo | 6 fields required |
| constellation | emotion_primary, emotion_subtone, narrative_arc | Other fields null |
| governance | jurisdiction, retention_policy (basis, ttl_days, on_expiry), subject_rights (portable, erasable, explainable) | Minimum governance |
| telemetry | entry_confidence, extraction_model | 2 fields |
| milky_way, gravity, impulse, system, crosswalks | — | Not included in this profile |
Example Artifact
A Essential Profile artifact with required fields populated and omitted fields set to explicit null values.
{
"meta": {
"id": "art_01HZ3G7K...",
"version": "0.8.0",
"profile": "essential",
"created_at": "2026-03-08T10:30:00Z",
"owner_user_id": "user_12345",
"consent_basis": "consent",
"visibility": "private",
"pii_tier": "tier_1"
},
"core": {
"anchor": "Career transition anxiety",
"spark": "Received unexpected job offer",
"wound": "Fear of making wrong choice",
"fuel": "Desire for growth and stability",
"bridge": "Previous job changes led to positive outcomes",
"echo": "Childhood patterns around risk-taking"
},
"constellation": {
"emotion_primary": "anxious_anticipation",
"emotion_subtone": ["hopeful", "uncertain"],
"narrative_arc": "threshold_crossing",
"emotion_secondary": null,
"valence_score": null,
"arousal_score": null
// ... other constellation fields null
},
"governance": {
"jurisdiction": "GDPR",
"retention_policy": {
"basis": "consent",
"ttl_days": 90,
"on_expiry": "delete"
},
"subject_rights": {
"portable": true,
"erasable": true,
"explainable": true
}
},
"telemetry": {
"entry_confidence": 0.85,
"extraction_model": "edm-extract-v0.7"
}
}Explicit null requirement: Fields not required by Essential Profile MUST be set to null. Field omission is prohibited. This preserves schema stability and enables consistent validation.
Use Cases
Session-level emotional context for conversational AI. Enough structure to maintain coherence without creating permanent records.
Extract salient emotional moments from conversation history for efficient retrieval and summarisation.
Pass emotional context through session without storage. Artifact expires with session — no persistence liability.
Ground agent behaviour in emotional context. Lightweight enough for real-time processing in agent loops.
Conformance Levels
Essential Profile artifacts are eligible for Compliant and Sealed conformance. Certified conformance is not available for Essential Profile — only Extended and Full profiles are Certified-eligible per ADR-0004.
| Level | Essential Profile | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Compliant | Valid EDM JSON. Schema-validated. | |
| Sealed | DeepaData-issued with registry entry. W3C Data Integrity Proof. | |
| Certified | Not available. Requires Extended or Full Profile. |
Why Essential is not Certified-eligible: Certified level requires DeepaData countersignature attesting to all five compliance checks (schema validity, provenance integrity, consent attestation, governance completeness, non-biometric confirmation). Essential Profile does not include sufficient governance fields for complete compliance attestation.
VitaPass binding: Available at Sealed conformance for all profiles. Essential Profile Sealed artifacts are addressable across vendor boundaries via VitaPass.