Track C2 / Specialist Phase 1 — freeze Cognee and TencentDB governance seams #88

Goal

Freeze evidence-backed governance seams for the two specialist candidates under #87 before any executable comparison.

Candidate revisions observed during discovery:

• Cognee topoteretes/cognee@690c0ec023719a2a277dc893cdecfec1ca8012cc
• TencentDB Agent Memory TencentCloud/TencentDB-Agent-Memory@5299c00aaf65481703c180fd69df066d11254eb7

Preliminary finding

Both candidates survive seam discovery; neither should be dismissed without an executable grant/revoke test.

Cognee

Public permission model is dataset-native:

• principals: User / Role / Tenant;
• permissions: read / write / delete / share;
• explicit grant and revoke APIs on datasets;
• share permission gates grant/revoke;
• enforcement is centralized in authorized dataset resolution for add/cognify/search/delete;
• ACL grants can surface in memory provenance.

This is a very direct match to the missing OV-5 contract, though the protected object is a dataset rather than an individual atom/memory.

TencentDB Agent Memory

Current Memory Hub exposes a first-class team/asset governance model:

• private / team / restricted / agent visibility;
• restricted is explicitly ACL-based for User / Role / Agent;
• metadata API includes acl grant, acl revoke, acl list, acl check;
• Panel authenticates via service instance + user key;
• assets have ownership and team/agent assignment semantics.

This is also a direct match and is more natively framed around shared Agent memory assets, but carries a larger runtime/control-plane footprint.

Next gate

Create one normalized executable contract and run it independently against both candidates:

A owns M → B denied → grant M/read to B → fresh B reads → revoke while A/B/M remain alive → fresh B denied → restart → B remains denied → A remains allowed.

Record whether M maps to a Cognee dataset vs TencentDB asset, but keep the decision semantics identical.

No OpenViking replacement work in this phase. OpenViking remains the qualified foundation/control.

Related: #63, #77, #87, #86.