Definition
Identifies an affordance used to request review or reconsideration of the prior decision identified by or unambiguously associated with its context.
Purpose
Appeal identifies purpose, not procedure. It allows a publisher to assert that an affordance exists for requesting review or reconsideration of a prior decision without requiring consumers to reconstruct that purpose from provider-specific names, descriptions, or workflow details.
Adjacent purposes (non-normative)
A complaint, dispute, support route, edit, retry, escalation, or cancellation does not qualify merely because it concerns the same matter. The relation applies only when the target is used to request review or reconsideration of the prior decision identified by or unambiguously associated with the context.
RFC 8288 binding
When used as an RFC 8288 link relation, the relation means:
Refers to a resource used to request review or reconsideration of the prior decision identified by or unambiguously associated with the link context.
The canonical extension relation URI is:
https://risuinstitute.org/rels/appeal
Example:
RFC 8288 permits extension relation types to be absolute URIs controlled by the party defining them. This identifier is intentionally lowercase and unversioned.
This URI is the experimental extension relation identifier. A future registered relation token appeal, if any, would be a different RFC 8288 relation identifier. RFC 8288 does not make the URI and token equivalent; any migration or dual-support policy would need to be specified separately.
Context requirement
The prior decision must be identified by, or unambiguously associated with, the relation context. A broad resource that could refer to several distinct decisions is not sufficient merely because some appeal mechanism exists somewhere beneath it.
Integrity rule: never widen context.
Non-assertions
The presence of appeal does not, by itself, assert any of the following:
- that a particular actor has standing, eligibility, or authorization to use the affordance;
- that a legal right or entitlement to appeal exists;
- that the affordance is currently invocable or will succeed when invoked;
- that the assertion is official, authoritative, trusted, or true merely because it is present;
- that the target uses any universal appeal API, workflow, schema, evidence model, or execution method;
- that multiple appeal relations are equivalent, ordered, exclusive, exhaustive, or interchangeable;
- that absence of the relation means no review, remedy, or appeal exists.
Multiple routes
A context may expose zero, one, or multiple appeal affordances. Multiple relations are a set of asserted routes; their presence alone does not imply priority, equivalence, exclusivity, or completeness.
Levels of review
Different levels of review can be represented through graph structure rather than relation subtypes. A decision produced by one review process may itself become the context for a later appeal relation.
Temporal and authorization boundaries
Discovery is not invocation. A representation can truthfully advertise an appeal affordance at one moment without guaranteeing that a later request remains timely, authorized, or acceptable. Freshness and invocation-time validation belong to the carrier and procedural system.
Provenance and trust
The semantic states what relation is being asserted. It does not state who should be trusted to make that assertion. Authenticity, authority, truth, and target acceptance are separate questions.
Boundary: meaning is not warrant.
Projection discipline
Systems that materialize this semantic from provider-native representations should emit it only when provider-controlled source assertions entail the meaning. Ambiguous human text, inferred eligibility, or guessed context is not enough.
General rule: translate semantics; do not invent semantics.
Experimental status
This is an experimental extension relation, not an IANA-registered link relation. Controlled experiments have demonstrated provider-independent consumer recognition without provider-specific purpose mapping and, in one clean-room instance, independent acquisition of the public definition followed by native RFC 8288 publication that a pre-existing frozen consumer discovered. These results do not demonstrate ecosystem adoption, organic adoption, independent organizational adoption, industry adoption, standardization, or universal interoperability. Experimental design and evidence anchors are published separately.
Versioning
This page describes specification version 0.2. The semantic identifier itself is intentionally unversioned. Compatible editorial or clarifying revisions may update this document without changing the identifier. A materially incompatible semantic would require a different identity.
References
History
v0.2 · 10 August 2026. Recorded the completed controlled interoperability experiments and clarified that the experimental URI and any future registered token are distinct relation identifiers.
v0.1 · 9 August 2026. Experimental semantic freeze and publication under a controlled HTTPS identifier.
Citation
RISU Institute. Appeal Semantic, experimental specification v0.2, 2026.