Who held it.

Who held it. Who scanned it. Who says so. Prove who held this item at every handoff — the moment the dispute lands on you. A run inside your own four walls cannot answer it once the item crosses a door, and the standard your program is built on cannot answer it anywhere: EPCIS 2.0 §7.2.2 defines five event dimensions, and no performer is among them — the Who the standard carries is a company, a GLN. This page is the performer's dimension — the flagship of the six, because it is the one the standard leaves at company grain.

who is the attested observer — a human, an agent, or an embodied agent such as a robot on a dock: the worker-doing-a-task grain the standard has no room for. capturedBy is the warrantor account — whose key opened the door and who stands behind the capture. They are never the same thing and they are never collapsed: an agent may observe under an account it does not own, and the record keeps both facts apart on purpose.

Party and organization grain are derived at read time from grant chains, never stamped on an event — which is what makes the record survive your reorg, your rebrand, and your revocations. Identity resolves through id.org.ai — Agent. Human. Thing..

What the gateway writes, illustratively, on every event it accepts — whatever the sender put in these fields is stripped, not trusted:

Illustrative — field names and stamping behavior are the written, verified spine. The standard's own projection of the same event validates against the pinned official GS1 EPCIS 2.0 schema on every capture, or the capture fails.

The shipping notice records who sent and who received. It is silent on the four hours in between: the carrier who picked it up, the 3PL whose dock the carton crossed, the returns desk it came back through. The custody spine records the observer at every joint, because the seam is where the dispute lives and the seam is what you hand the auditor.

The purest form of the missing dimension: no compliance clock, no mandate — just an investigation that ends at “seen here, then not.” This segment exhausted what read-point counting can tell it years ago. Every unit was scanned; the evidence that could name a handler — POD signatures, CCTV, WMS logins — sits outside the event record and does not join to it, because the standard has no performer field to join on. The marginal information left in a fully-instrumented chain is not another read. It is a witness.

The strongest illustration of the missing Who anywhere in this estate is a 3PL dock on an ordinary shift, where a meaningful share of the labor is agency or temp. Custody is that business’s product, custody actually changes hands on that dock — and the standard record of a custody change has no place to name who took it: five dimensions, no performer, party fields at organization grain. The spine’s record names the attested observer at every handoff, including the embodied one — a robot or an autonomous reader on the dock is attested the same way a person is, and neither is ever confused with the account that warrants the capture. The full read for that operation is at Logistics & 3PL; the claims-and-shrink read is at Retail & eCommerce.

What the two grains add up to, and the sentence this whole door exists to earn: Everyone in this market has built a network that is authoritative because you joined it. This platform makes a record that is verifiable whether or not you joined anything — and it carries, in the record itself, an attested answer to who observed the event, including when the observer was an agent.