Responsibility Is a Relationship, Not a Property
An ownership connection assigns accountability: this team owns that service, this role controls that resource, this principal delegates that capability. Nothing flows and nothing fires — the edge declares a standing relationship of authority and answerability. When an incident page goes out, ownership edges are the ones that tell you whom to wake up.
Diagrams that draw ownership as ordinary flow arrows produce a predictable disaster: readers assume data or control traverses the edge, provision channels that should not exist, and overlook the actual governance boundary. Ownership is about who answers for a node, not what passes between nodes.
Core Diagnostic Rule: Ownership Edges Assign Accountability, Never Motion
If removing the edge changes who gets paged or who can approve a change — but stops no data — you are looking at an ownership connection. Draw it as a bounded region or a distinctly styled edge, never as a flow line.
Capability delegation is ownership's dynamic twin: a service account impersonating a role, an agent acting under a user's credentials, a federated identity crossing a trust boundary. These edges carry authority, not payloads, and deserve explicit modeling because they are where privilege-escalation bugs live.