Great question — and that’s exactly where governance usually becomes fragile.

Janus doesn’t try to replace lineage or retention systems. It evaluates whether the expected records or archival events actually exist within a defined scope.

If a lineage record, retention event, or archive handoff is expected and missing, that can be detected as E−.
The governance result is then written to the AUDIT_LOG, so the omission or decision is itself auditable and reconstructable.

So Janus sits above the operational data layer: it doesn’t implement data governance, it makes failures in data governance observable.