{"schema_version":1,"assessment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_opportunity320_20260801","source_experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp03_full320_20260801","cell_id":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management__history_historiography","archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"history_historiography","title":"Explicit Lifecycle States for Versioned Historical-Research Artifacts","opportunity_summary":"Test whether assigning current, superseded, archived, held, and withdrawn states to derivative historical-research artifacts can reduce wrong-version retrieval and reconciliation effort without losing provenance, dependencies, rights protections, or recoverability. The sealed candidate provides a reversible shadow-pilot design, but does not establish problem prevalence, stakeholder demand, incremental effect, distinctiveness, or production-scale resource requirements.","adopter_authorizer":"The repository steward and project principal investigator would adopt and approve visibility changes, subject to records or legal control of holds and qualified-historian review of significance.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Wrong-version citations, duplicated reconciliation work, and unsafe deletion could materially affect interpretive accuracy and reproducibility. However, the candidate marks both prevalence and consequences as hypotheses, so aggregate impact is unestablished."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"The candidate identifies historians, assistants, archivists, repository stewards, and affected communities, but supplies no requests, observed complaints, usage evidence, budget commitment, or willingness to adopt."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":3,"rationale":"Explicit lifecycle states, discovery demotion, dependency checks, tombstones, and restore tests offer a testable difference from informal naming and from version control that leaves every version equally active. Whether this difference improves selection accuracy or retrieval time remains hypothetical."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"The composition is coherent, but its components resemble general lifecycle, provenance, quarantine, and restoration concepts. Prior-art status is explicitly unsearched, so distinctiveness relative to repository governance and archival workflows cannot be affirmed."},"technical_implementability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Label assignment, shadow discovery tests, quarantine, tombstones, and sampled restores are technically tractable on a corpus of at most 200 artifacts. Implementation is constrained by implicit scholarly dependencies, external citations, heterogeneous metadata, and significance judgments that may not be machine-observable."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":4,"rationale":"The candidate names the repository steward, principal investigator, records or legal officer, and qualified historian and allocates their decisions. Feasibility is reduced by the need to coordinate those authorities and potentially consult rights holders or affected communities."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"A six-week, non-destructive shadow pilot specifies one closed corpus, at most 200 artifacts, 20 blinded retrieval tasks, dependency tracing, ten restores, a baseline comparison, falsifiers, and halt conditions. Measurement procedures and decision thresholds beyond safety failures still require definition."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":5,"rationale":"The proposal directly protects against both stale exposure and unsafe deletion through demotion or quarantine, tombstones, dependency and hold checks, sampled restores, preservation of all bytes, explicit exclusions, and immediate rollback conditions."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"A common lifecycle vocabulary and repeatable review process could transfer across projects, but manual significance review, legal variation, implicit dependencies, corpus heterogeneity, and differing repository systems make scale uncertain."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Six-week shadow pilot on one closed corpus of no more than 200 derivative artifacts, including inventory, state assignment, 20 blinded retrieval tasks, dependency tracing, ten sampled restores, analysis, and governance review.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["Existing repository access and ordinary search interfaces can be used without major software development.","The corpus is already digitized and its artifacts can be inventoried within the six-week period.","Costs include historian, repository, research-assistant, technical, and limited records or legal labor.","No deletion, public-index change, or production migration occurs."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Preparation of one bounded repository program for production use, including lifecycle metadata design, inventory assessment, dependency-mapping workflow, governance rules, discovery integration, access controls, restore procedures, and compliance review.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Deployment uses an existing repository rather than replacing its core platform.","The artifact backlog is moderate and can be processed with a mix of automated and manual review.","No major rights remediation, mass format conversion, or bespoke preservation infrastructure is required.","The sealed candidate does not specify repository size, metadata quality, or integration complexity."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Initial production rollout for one bounded repository program, including backlog classification, quality assurance, historian and legal exceptions review, staff training, user communication, acceptance testing, restore drills, and launch evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Startup integrations and governance have already been completed.","Launch remains non-destructive and uses demotion or quarantine before any disposition decision.","A substantial fraction of artifacts requires manual significance or dependency review.","The number of projects, users, and external citation relationships is unknown."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Annual stewardship for one bounded repository program, including new-version classification, periodic lifecycle reviews, hold and rights checks, exception handling, storage, monitoring, dependency updates, restore sampling, and user support.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Reviews require recurring repository-steward and historian labor plus occasional records or legal input.","Preservation copies remain stored and tested.","Corpus growth and the rate of new versions are moderate but unspecified.","The band excludes expansion to multiple large institutions or extensive retrospective remediation."]}},"research_burden":"MODERATE","earliest_credible_horizon":"0_TO_3_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The candidate describes an observable version-confusion mechanism and a stratified problem falsifier, but labels the coexistence pattern, stale use, reconciliation burden, and consequences as inferences or hypotheses without audit or user evidence."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"Repository stewards and project principal investigators are named as visibility decision-makers, with records or legal officers controlling holds and qualified historians reviewing significance."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The proposal can be compared with ordinary discovery or equally active version-control layers on wrong-version selection, retrieval time, missed dependencies, and restore success."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"The sealed candidate authorizes a six-week shadow pilot on one closed corpus of at most 200 artifacts, with 20 blinded retrieval tasks, ten restores, no deletion or public-index changes, and explicit halt conditions."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"The authorized first step is reversible and non-destructive, preserves all bytes, assigns relevant approval roles, excludes held, contested, unique, or dependency-unknown material from disposition, and halts on hidden current artifacts, unresolved dependencies, or restore failure."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The pilot scope permits a broad first-evidence estimate, but the candidate does not specify production corpus size, backlog quality, repository integrations, review volume, citation observability, or compliance burden needed to support a reliable deployment range."}},"blocking_evidence":["A stratified corpus audit showing how often lifecycle states are ambiguous and how frequently users select stale artifacts or incur reconciliation delay.","Baseline and comparative results from blinded retrieval tasks, including wrong-version selections and retrieval time.","Evidence that dependencies and externally cited versions can be identified reliably enough to prevent unsafe demotion or withdrawal.","Successful restoration of sampled archived copies with preserved provenance and intelligible tombstones.","Stakeholder evidence that repository stewards, historians, records or legal officers, and affected parties consider the problem important and the governance process acceptable.","A scoped prior-art review comparing the composition with repository governance, digital-edition versioning, archival lifecycle, and preservation workflows.","A production inventory and integration assessment sufficient to bound backlog labor, compliance review, software changes, storage, and recurring stewardship."] ,"next_evidence_step":"Run the authorized six-week shadow pilot on one closed project corpus of at most 200 derivative artifacts. First audit state ambiguity and baseline retrieval behavior, then compare 20 blinded retrieval tasks using ordinary discovery with the same tasks using proposed lifecycle-state cues; trace dependencies and restore ten archived copies. Falsify the problem if nearly all artifacts are already unambiguous and users reliably choose intended versions without delay; falsify the intervention if it does not improve wrong-version selection or retrieval time, or if any task-relevant current artifact is hidden, dependency remains unresolved, or sampled restore fails. Make no deletions or public-index changes.","research_questions":["How often are sampled artifacts genuinely ambiguous among current, superseded, archived, held, and withdrawn states?","How often do users select an unintended version, and how much reconciliation time is attributable to version ambiguity?","Does lifecycle-state presentation improve selection accuracy or retrieval time relative to ordinary discovery?","What proportion of scholarly dependencies and external citations can be observed before visibility changes are proposed?","Can significance judgments be governed separately from judgments about truth, popularity, or institutional preference?","Do tombstones and preservation copies support reliable reconstruction and citation resolution after demotion or quarantine?","Which rights, records, community-consultation, or binding-destruction rules constrain classification and retention?","How does the proposed composition differ from implemented repository, digital-edition, versioning, archival-lifecycle, and preservation practices?"] ,"recommendation":"VALIDATE_PROBLEM_FIRST","uncertainty_constraints":["Problem prevalence, stakeholder demand, realized error reduction, reconciliation savings, and aggregate impact are unsupported in the sealed record.","World novelty and prior art are unmeasured; the conceptual nearest rival is not evidence of distinctiveness.","Implicit dependencies, external citations, historical significance, rights obligations, and binding destruction requirements may not be fully observable.","Production corpus scale, metadata condition, integration complexity, review burden, and recurring growth are unspecified, limiting cost confidence.","The pilot can establish local decision evidence but cannot by itself establish transferability across repositories or communities."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"The sealed candidate explicitly reports prior-art status as UNSEARCHED and identifies novelty evidence as weak. The record supports only a hypothesis that this mechanism composition may differ from informal version naming or provenance-rich systems that leave all versions equally active; it does not support claims about novelty, prevalence, existing implementations, market size, or comparative realized impact."}