The Term-State Registry is a governance specification by Lee Sharks for tracking coined entities through machine-mediated retrieval.
It defines eleven states from internal minting and public seeding through retrieval, attribution, field formation, institutionalization, orphaning, dissolution, collision, and settlement. Each state has transition conditions, risks, and proposed repair instruments.
The registry distinguishes survival of a concept from survival of its author and institutional form. It proposes weekly reassessment and compact provenance-coupling statements for terms, heteronyms, and distributed institutions.
The lifecycle is an archive-defined management system. States should be recorded per substrate and date rather than treated as permanent global properties.