Rendered from docs/decisions/0010-naming.md in the Headwater corpus. Every document on this half of the site is typed by the taxonomy the descriptor names: corpus.json.

Q10 — Naming

Context

The name was a working name through the design phase, and the namespace that every emitted artifact carries depends on it. No evaluation was run for this decision, and none was needed. What settled it was the availability of a domain, and the separation of two assets that the entry had treated as one.

Decision

The name is Headwater. It is the settled name of the system rather than a working name, and the design phase does not reopen it.

The casing has two forms, and they do not mix. In prose, the name of the system is Headwater, capitalized. As an identifier, it is headwater in lower case. It names the CLI verb that people type dozens of times a day, and the package name. It also names the .headwater/ directory, the headwater: annotation prefix, and the https://w3id.org/headwater/ namespace.

Consequences

The namespace and the web address are separate assets, from 2026-08-11. The namespace is https://w3id.org/headwater/. The W3C Permanent Identifier Community Group runs w3id.org, and it redirects a permanent identifier to whatever location the project hosts today. The web address is an ordinary domain. A change of domain therefore reaches no emitted artifact.

This decision first fixed the namespace at https://headwater.dev/, and an unrelated consultancy holds that domain. The separation is the better arrangement in any case. A namespace URI outlives every release, and a domain that the project rents by the year is a weak vehicle for that promise. Q11 reads the namespace as the instrument that the trademark reservation protects, and the path w3id.org/headwater carries that reading unchanged.