Silver Canonicalization

Summary

Silver is the lakehouse layer where source-shaped records become canonical entities, crosswalks, and normalized relationships.

Problem

Operational systems rarely agree on identity. Customers, locations, jobs, technicians, vendors, and prospects can appear in multiple systems with different identifiers and partial context. If each downstream workflow solves identity locally, the platform accumulates conflicting truth.

Principle

Normalize once into silver where possible. Keep canonical entities and crosswalks as shared data products that other transforms, jobs, and services can reuse.

Platform Shape

The lakehouse docs identify silver transforms for customers, locations, jobs, appointments, technicians, vendors, and prospect-related entities under pipelines/lakehouse/transform/silver. The services/lkci_lakehouse package is the service boundary for reading or writing lakehouse state rather than scattering SQL across callers.

Silver should still be rebuildable. It is more canonical than bronze, but it is not the same as mutable operator state.

Source Evidence

  • docs/domains/lakehouse.md
  • pipelines/lakehouse/transform/silver
  • services/lkci_lakehouse
  • docs/engineering/concepts/canonical-entities.md
  • docs/engineering/concepts/gold-operational-facts.md