0009 Separate Deal Events Identity And Rights

Separate Deal Events, Deal Identity, and Asset Rights

Status: accepted

Context

A press release, filing, or article reports one event about a transaction. The commercial transaction itself can outlive that article and acquire later signing, closing, amendment, and termination evidence. Ownership and licence rights are later consequences, not synonyms for either the article or the deal.

A read-only production Data Gov sample on 2026-07-23 confirmed that this distinction is material:

• 4,373 organisation-history rows had 8,650 participant rows;
• 88 exact deal-type + participant-role + asset fingerprints repeated across 184 history rows;
• 48 repeated fingerprints spanned multiple articles, 45 spanned multiple dates, and 24 mixed executed and non-executed states;
• projected completion dates existed on non-executed acquisitions;
• the legacy deal-reference field was not a usable identity authority: 1,941 populated rows had only 13 distinct values, with one value repeated 1,689 times.

SEC disclosure structure independently preserves the same lifecycle distinction: Form 8-K Item 1.01 covers entry into a material definitive agreement, while Item 2.01 covers completion of an acquisition or disposition. See the SEC Form 8-K and SEC disclosure rule.

Decision

The system uses three grains:

1. Deal Lifecycle Event is news-owned. canonical.news_deal_events retains one accepted, source-scoped event, its participants, terms, lifecycle wording, event date, and artifact.
2. Business Deal is organisation-intelligence-owned. canonical.business_deals assigns one durable key to one or more lifecycle events and derives only announced, signed, effective, and terminated dates/state.
3. Asset Rights Interval is organisation-intelligence-owned. canonical.drug_ownership_periods records time- and territory-scoped consequences only after an explicit effective/completed event or reviewed curation decision.

canonical.business_deal_event_links is the boundary between event and deal ownership. Automatic clustering is allowed only for exact, order-independent semantic fingerprints with sufficient participant and asset identity. Thin or ambiguous events remain one-deal-per-event. Financing events never auto-cluster. A high-impact reviewed business_deal_cluster_decision may assign an event to an explicit stable business_deal_key; fuzzy matching and legacy cluster identifiers are never acceptance bases.

An announced or projected completion date cannot create effective_date, acquisition relationships, ownership, or licence rights. Every q_organisation_deals row retains provenance links to every contributing event artifact.

Considered Options

• Treat every article event as a complete deal.
• Copy news events into a second organisation-owned event table.
• Import legacy news_deal_reference_uid as cluster identity.
• Merge events with fuzzy participant/title similarity.
• Separate source event, durable transaction, and temporal rights grains.

Consequences

• q_news_deal_events answers what a source said happened; q_organisation_deals answers which durable transaction those events describe.
• Backfills can add later lifecycle evidence without rewriting source events.
• Exact clustering intentionally produces false-negative splits when evidence is insufficient; reviewed curation resolves important splits without risking silent false merges.
• Rights history remains replayable and cannot be moved by a projected date.
• Corporate changes such as name changes remain news/corporate events unless they are a genuine commercial transaction; they do not enter the Business Deal grain merely for compatibility.