{"schema_version":1,"research_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_external48_20260801","source_assessment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_opportunity320_20260801","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__marine_science","selection_stratum":"DEPLOYABLE_PRIORITY","search_queries":["site:noaa.gov ocean data lifecycle version superseded archive preservation authoritative version","site:ioos.noaa.gov data management lifecycle versioning archive quality control","ocean observatory data versioning superseded dataset repository provenance","FAIR data versioning repository tombstone preservation scientific data official guidance","site:oceanobservatories.org metadata change tracker previously downloaded data re-download calibration corrections","site:noaa.gov \"Data Management Handbook\" retention disposition preservation archive DOI version","RDA data versioning principles revision release provenance citation official","site:usgs.gov dataset revision superseded version DOI retain older version guidance","site:archives.gov digital preservation fixity checks restore test archive official","site:aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing Glacier retrieval pricing official","site:bls.gov occupational employment wages data scientist database administrator 2025"],"sources":[{"source_id":"S1","title":"Data Updates and Corrections","publisher":"Ocean Observatories Initiative","url":"https://oceanobservatories.org/data-updates-corrections/","source_class":"OFFICIAL_ORGANIZATION_DATA","publication_date":"undated; includes updates through 2025","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["OOI records revisions arising from metadata, calibration, and processing changes.","OOI tells users to check whether changes affect prior downloads and to download corrected data again.","OOI discourages analysis with a specified L1 product affected by an incorrect salinity value and recommends the corrected L2 product."]},{"source_id":"S2","title":"OOI Critical Metadata Review","publisher":"Ocean Observatories Initiative","url":"https://oceanobservatories.org/data-status/ooi-critical-metadata-review/","source_class":"OFFICIAL_ORGANIZATION_DATA","publication_date":"undated","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["OOI used combined human and automated review of calibration and deployment metadata.","Its change tracker identifies affected instruments and time ranges and links to source-file histories.","Annotations communicating issues and corrections can be included in subsequent data requests."]},{"source_id":"S3","title":"OOI Project Year 2 Annual Work Plan","publisher":"Ocean Observatories Initiative","url":"https://oceanobservatories.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/1001-00200_Annual_Work_Plan_PY2_OOI.pdf","source_class":"OFFICIAL_ORGANIZATION_DATA","publication_date":"2010-08-31","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["OOI planned a data-management subsystem providing lifecycle management, federation, preservation, and presentation across streams, repositories, and catalogs.","The planned persistent archive services included cataloging, preservation, validation, and curation.","The historical project-year budget for one subsystem release shows that observatory-scale lifecycle infrastructure is a material software, integration, testing, and labor undertaking."]},{"source_id":"S4","title":"Guidance on Documenting Revisions to USGS Scientific Digital Data Releases","publisher":"U.S. Geological Survey","url":"https://www.usgs.gov/office-of-science-quality-and-integrity/guidance-documenting-revisions-usgs-scientific-digital-data","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"2023-09","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["USGS defines governed revision levels according to effects on data use and downstream processes.","The guidance assigns approval steps, version numbers, linked identifiers, version histories, successor routing, and tombstone pages.","Prior versions must be preserved subject to records and litigation holds because they may be needed to understand earlier scientific conclusions.","The guidance recognizes automated version management as an option when frequent revisions make manual archiving inefficient."]},{"source_id":"S5","title":"Principles and best practices in data versioning for all data sets big and small","publisher":"Research Data Alliance","url":"https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/data-versioning-ig/outputs/?output=94568","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"2020-01-16","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["The RDA working group produced community-reviewed recommendations for systematic research-data versioning.","The recommendations address reproducibility, persistent identification, releases, provenance, and citation.","The practices were developed from multi-organization use cases and are intended for data management at different scales."]},{"source_id":"S6","title":"About the Digital Preservation Program","publisher":"U.S. National Archives and Records Administration","url":"https://www.archives.gov/preservation/digital-preservation/about","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"2026-03-20","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["NARA preservation operations include fixity checks, format validation, manifests, logs, sampled media audits, and infrastructure monitoring.","NARA reports regular backup-restoration tests, demonstrating that periodic recovery testing is an established preservation control."]},{"source_id":"S7","title":"Archive","publisher":"NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information","url":"https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/archive","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"undated","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["NCEI operates a defined archive and appraisal process under NOAA lifecycle guidance.","Appraisal considers whether a submission is an original observation or derived product, whether source observations are archived, revision frequency, size, metadata, formats, and required discovery or access services.","NCEI notes storage-resource constraints and challenges in preserving some data systems and formats."]},{"source_id":"S8","title":"S3 Pricing","publisher":"Amazon Web Services","url":"https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/","source_class":"COMMERCIAL_FIRST_PARTY","publication_date":"undated; current pricing page","accessed_at":"2026-08-02","claims_supported":["Commercial object storage supports lifecycle transitions among active and archival classes.","Archive costs include storage duration, metadata, request, transition, retrieval, and temporary restored-copy charges, so tiering costs cannot be represented by storage capacity alone."]}],"problem_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"OOI directly confirms that calibration, metadata, and processing corrections can make prior downloads incorrect and that some lower-level products should not be used in analysis. USGS independently recognizes that revisions can affect scientific conclusions and break dependent processes. This supports the correctness and lineage problem, but the search found no target-level measurement of superseded-product selection, active-storage growth, search burden, or disposition backlog.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4"]},"stakeholder_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"OOI maintains a correction tracker and combines data-team review with automation; NCEI operates formal appraisal and archive workflows; and RDA developed versioning guidance from multi-organization use cases. These are credible signs of operational demand for versioning and preservation, but no source documents demand, procurement, or adoption commitment for this candidate's complete scored-lifecycle composition.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S5","S7"]},"prior_art":{"proximity":"ESTABLISHED_PRACTICE","closest_analogues":[{"name":"USGS governed scientific-data revision process","similarity":"It already combines impact-based lifecycle states, multi-role approval, version identity, successor links, preserved withdrawn versions, records and litigation holds, tombstones, and optional automated version management. This is a close match to governed dispositions that preserve citation and reconstruction.","remaining_difference":"It does not specify the candidate's composite prioritization score, explicit derivation-graph veto, active-versus-cold observatory footprint objective, repeated exception revalidation, or a comparative ocean-observatory restore experiment.","source_ids":["S4"]},{"name":"OOI lifecycle services and correction/change-tracker workflow","similarity":"This is marine-observatory-specific prior art: OOI planned lifecycle management, catalog, preservation, validation, and curation services and now communicates metadata and processing corrections affecting prior downloads through machine-linked histories and annotations.","remaining_difference":"The opened evidence does not demonstrate governed hot-to-cold tiering, citation/dependency vetoes, tombstones, exception expiry, or restore drills as one operational workflow, nor does it report effects on obsolete-version selection or stewardship effort.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3"]},{"name":"RDA data-versioning practices plus established digital-preservation controls","similarity":"RDA supplies standard version, release, identifier, provenance, and citation practices, while NARA demonstrates fixity, validation, audit logging, monitoring, and restoration testing. Together they cover most technical safeguards in the candidate.","remaining_difference":"These cross-domain practices do not establish that combining them with authority-state decay and storage-tier decisions produces incremental benefit in an ocean observatory.","source_ids":["S5","S6"]}],"distinctive_claim_remaining":"The remaining testable claim is narrow: within a specific observatory that may already use version labels and correction notices, integrating explicit authority states, derivation and citation vetoes, reversible tier recommendations, expiring exceptions, and sampled restoration will outperform both the current workflow and improved labels alone on authoritative-version selection and steward effort without degrading citation resolution, dependency coverage, retrieval, or reconstruction.","confidence":"HIGH"},"implementation_evidence":{"support":"STRONG","rationale":"The component operations are individually established: OOI has marine-data lifecycle, catalog, preservation, and correction-tracking infrastructure; USGS specifies governed revision, retention, successor, and tombstone workflows; NARA performs fixity, logging, monitoring, and restoration tests; and commercial storage exposes lifecycle and archival retrieval mechanisms. The unresolved engineering issue is historical identity and dependency completeness, not basic component feasibility.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S6","S8"]},"scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Correcting calibration and processing errors can materially affect scientific use, as OOI's warnings and product recommendation demonstrate. The score is capped because no source quantifies obsolete-version use, affected analyses, storage savings, or steward burden for a representative observatory.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4"]},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":3,"rationale":"OOI and NCEI devote operational processes to corrections, appraisal, preservation, and archive decisions, while RDA documents broad versioning demand. Evidence of willingness to adopt this exact integrated workflow is absent.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S5","S7"]},"incremental_advantage":{"score":2,"rationale":"Dependency vetoes, expiring exceptions, tier recommendations, and restore-based evaluation could improve a labels-only workflow, but the proposed baseline understates existing practice: USGS and OOI already cover much of the lifecycle composition. No comparative outcome evidence establishes additional value.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S6"]},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":1,"rationale":"Close prior art covers nearly all major mechanisms, including marine-observatory lifecycle services, governed revision states, holds, preserved withdrawals, successor routing, tombstones, fixity, and restoration testing. Only a narrower integrated evaluation claim remains.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S5","S6"]},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"Existing OOI workflows and cross-domain official practices demonstrate implementable metadata tracking, lifecycle control, archival preservation, integrity validation, and recovery testing. Legacy dependency resolution and heterogeneous formats prevent the highest score.","source_ids":["S2","S3","S4","S6","S7","S8"]},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"USGS guidance demonstrates workable multi-role approval and records-hold controls, and NCEI has an institutional appraisal process. The precise division of authority among the target observatory, repository, principal investigators, records officials, and governed communities remains unverified.","source_ids":["S4","S7"]},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"OOI's change tracker, affected date ranges, annotations, and source-file histories provide a plausible sampling frame for a read-only comparison. Access logs, citations, derivation links, and representative user tasks may still require substantial cleaning and adjudication.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4"]},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"Preserving prior versions under holds, maintaining tombstones and successor links, checking fixity, logging actions, and testing restoration are established safeguards against irrecoverable loss and broken resolution. Their effectiveness for the target corpus remains to be tested.","source_ids":["S4","S6"]},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"RDA frames systematic versioning as applicable across scales, and OOI and NCEI demonstrate institutional-scale lifecycle and archive processes. NCEI also documents that revision frequency, corpus size, source-product relationships, formats, and service requirements require collection-specific appraisal.","source_ids":["S3","S5","S7"]}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"A read-only audit of one completed instrument-year, including steward, marine-scientist, data-engineering, repository, and evaluation labor; access-log and metadata preparation; citation and derivation sampling; labels-only and governed-state prototypes; governance and records review; archive retrieval and checksum tests; coordination; software; and existing equipment use. No deletion or production change.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Existing catalog, correction, storage, and access records can be exported without new procurement.","The audit uses existing compute and storage equipment and pays only incremental service and retrieval charges.","Labor dominates the resource-equivalent cost; BLS provides current occupational-cost context, while OOI's historical plan confirms that lifecycle work requires specialist development, testing, and integration.","Corpus size, metadata quality, and citation-link coverage are not yet known."],"source_ids":["S2","S3","S4","S6","S8"]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"One-observatory design and implementation of authority states, dependency and hold vetoes, tier recommendations, tombstone and successor routing, exception expiry, audit logs, monitoring, policy and compliance review, user research, integrations, testing, evaluation, training materials, and incremental compute, storage, retrieval, and software services.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Core catalog and archive infrastructure already exists.","The implementation adapts established versioning and preservation practices instead of creating a new repository.","Historical metadata requires material but not complete manual reconstruction.","Unresolved collections remain held; startup does not include permanent deletion or replacement of major storage equipment."],"source_ids":["S3","S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Controlled production launch across selected observatory collections, including backlog adjudication, contributor and user coordination, records and governance approvals, archive transfers, checksum and restoration validation, communications, support, monitoring, software operations, retrieval charges, and independent outcome evaluation. Permanent deletion remains outside scope until separately authorized.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Launch covers one observatory and selected collections, not a national network.","Existing archival services and equipment have adequate capacity.","Collections with unresolved citations, dependencies, restrictions, or authority remain active or quarantined.","The historical OOI subsystem budget is used only as order-of-magnitude evidence, not as a 2026 price quote."],"source_ids":["S3","S4","S6","S7","S8"]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Ongoing steward and repository labor, exception and policy revalidation, dependency and citation updates, integrity monitoring, sampled restore drills, tombstone maintenance, user support, compliance coordination, software maintenance, equipment allocation, storage, transition and retrieval charges, and annual evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Routine state recommendations are automated but exceptions receive human review.","No major format migration, recovery incident, archive replacement, or new hardware fleet occurs in a typical year.","Retrieval and request charges vary with use, so savings from lower storage tiers are not treated as guaranteed.","The eligible corpus and annual revision rate remain within existing archive capacity."],"source_ids":["S4","S6","S7","S8"]}},"verified_pipeline_gates":{"externally_supported_problem":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"OOI directly establishes consequential corrections and the risk that previously downloaded data are no longer correct, but this bounded search did not verify the candidate's claimed prevalence of superseded-product selection, search confusion, active-storage growth, or disposition backlog.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4"]},"externally_credible_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"OOI data teams already operate correction review and NCEI operates formal archive appraisal; USGS guidance demonstrates credible author, data-manager, director, records, and approving-official roles for revision decisions.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4","S7"]},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"Although the broad composition is established practice, a specific incremental comparison remains: current workflow versus improved labels alone versus integrated authority states, dependency vetoes, reversible tiering, expiring exceptions, and restore validation.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S3","S4","S6"]},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"OOI's affected-instrument and date-range tracker supports a bounded completed-instrument-year audit, and established preservation controls permit simulated dispositions and sampled restoration without deleting or hiding live data.","source_ids":["S2","S4","S6"]},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"For the read-only evidence step only, no unresolved stop is apparent: official guidance supports preserving prior versions, honoring holds, retaining resolution metadata, applying approvals, and validating recovery. This does not authorize production tiering or deletion.","source_ids":["S4","S6"]},"credible_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"YES","reason":"The bands include specialist labor, data preparation, governance and records review, coordination, software integration, equipment or service capacity, archival requests and retrievals, training, and evaluation. OOI's historical subsystem scope and current storage-pricing structure support the order of magnitude, but unspecified corpus and metadata conditions keep confidence low.","source_ids":["S3","S7","S8"]}},"next_evidence_step":"Run a pre-registered, read-only study on one completed instrument-year containing known calibration or metadata changes. For the same stratified set of catalog tasks and disposition candidates, compare (A) the current portal and manual workflow, (B) improved authoritative-version labels and successor links only, and (C) simulated governed states with citation and derivation vetoes, reversible tier recommendations, expiring exceptions, and a sampled archive restore. Measure blinded authoritative-version selection, time and confidence to identify the current product, steward adjudication time, active-tier bytes merely eligible for movement, unresolved citation or dependency rate, retrieval delay, checksum agreement, and reconstruction success. Falsify the diagnosed problem if arm A shows negligible wrong-version selection and negligible material burden under pre-registered thresholds; reject the incremental intervention if C does not outperform B on selection or steward effort, or if C produces any excess broken citation, missed dependency, unacceptable retrieval delay, checksum failure, or reconstruction failure. Make no production status change, concealment, or permanent deletion.","blocking_evidence":["No representative access-log or user-task study quantifies selection of superseded ocean-observatory products.","No target-level accounting separates active-storage and stewardship burden caused by superseded layers from legitimate alternative processing and irreplaceable historical observations.","The target observatory's current implementation of lifecycle states, archive testing, holds, successor links, and dependency metadata has not been audited; it may already implement much of the candidate.","Completeness and accuracy of citation, derivation, calibration, and governance links are unknown.","No controlled comparison shows that the integrated workflow improves outcomes beyond authoritative-version labels and successor routing alone.","Archive checksum integrity, reconstruction success, credential and tooling durability, and acceptable retrieval delays have not been demonstrated for the selected corpus."],"research_disposition":"KNOWN_PRACTICE_DIFFUSION","world_novelty_boundary":"This assessment expressly reaches no world-novelty conclusion and must not be interpreted as one. The bounded search found close, established prior art across OOI, USGS, RDA, NARA, and NOAA archive practice; it did not exhaust all observatories, repositories, standards, publications, patents, products, or implementations worldwide. Any remaining difference is only the narrowly specified, testable integration-and-comparison claim for a particular observatory."}