{"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__linguistics_semiotics","archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"linguistics_semiotics","title":"Lifecycle-governed authority for annotation guidance","opportunity_summary":"Test whether identity-resolved lifecycle labels, successor links, dependency checks, discovery demotion, and reversible archival controls reduce use of obsolete annotation guidance while preserving reconstruction of historical annotation decisions. The candidate is structurally testable, but the prevalence and materiality of authority drift remain hypotheses.","adopter_authorizer":"The corpus owner and annotation-governance board can authorize status and discovery changes; records or compliance clearance and accountable artifact ownership are additionally required before any destruction.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Applying obsolete conventions could impair annotation consistency and interpretation, while loss of older guidance could impair reproducibility. The packet provides no evidence about encounter frequency, affected corpus volume, or realized harm, leaving impact magnitude uncertain."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"The packet identifies corpus stewards, annotators, researchers, represented communities, and integrity stakeholders, but reports no adopter request, observed demand, budget commitment, or demonstrated frequency of authority-related incidents."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":4,"rationale":"Relative to immutable history plus improved current-document ranking, the proposal adds explicit authority states, retention classes, dependency-gated disposition, quarantine, successor routing, tombstones, restore testing, and exception revalidation. Whether these additions improve outcomes is unmeasured."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The combined lifecycle-governance package is meaningfully differentiated from the sealed nearest rival, but prior-art status is explicitly UNSEARCHED and overlap with corpus governance, documentation versioning, or records-lifecycle practice is unknown."},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"A read-only index covering at most 100 artifacts, with separate status labels and dependency tracing, is bounded and avoids source modification. Implementability is reduced by the stated possibility that identities cannot be resolved or dependencies remain invisible."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":4,"rationale":"The packet names the corpus owner and annotation-governance board as status authorities and separately constrains destruction through records or compliance clearance. Distributed community authority, contested conventions, and unclear ownership could still prevent broader adoption."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"The candidate specifies an eight-week read-only pilot, baseline and rival comparisons, measurable retrieval and reconstruction outcomes, problem and intervention falsifiers, and halt conditions. Sampling, metrics, and representative-task selection still require specification."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":5,"rationale":"The proposal explicitly preserves provenance through archival retention, tombstones, successor links, dependency checks, holds, restoration tests, rollback, and a ban on automatic deletion, directly limiting irreversible harm if lifecycle judgments are wrong."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"The index-and-policy pattern could be repeated across projects, but scaling depends on stable artifact identities, visible dependencies, accountable owners, locally legitimate authority classifications, and safeguards against marginalizing plural or minority conventions."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Eight-week read-only pilot for one annotation project and at most 100 guidance artifacts, including inventory, separate-index labeling, dependency tracing, comparison design, stakeholder review, and evaluation.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["Existing repositories and search interfaces can be used without major integration work.","The pilot uses internal staff or equivalent labor and does not alter source artifacts or published annotations.","No unusually costly legal review, data-access negotiation, or community consultation is required.","Retrieval and reconstruction tests use an available sample of users and historical tasks."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Startup for one corpus program after successful evidence, including identity normalization, lifecycle metadata, governance policy, ownership assignment, dependency records, access controls, workflow integration, and staff preparation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Deployment is limited to one program rather than an institution-wide archive.","Existing document storage, version control, authentication, and search systems remain in place.","Legacy artifacts require substantial manual review but no bulk reannotation.","Compliance and represented-community consultation remain bounded."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Operational activation across the selected program, including reviewed status changes, successor routing, discovery demotion, quarantine controls, restore testing, user communication, launch monitoring, and comparative evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["No source deletion is included.","Most artifacts can be identity-resolved and assigned accountable owners.","Search and repository systems permit reversible presentation changes without replacement.","Launch does not require rebuilding the corpus platform or changing published annotations."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Annual governance and maintenance for one program, including new-artifact intake, exception revalidation, dependency updates, stakeholder review, audit sampling, restore tests, and monitoring of retrieval or reconstruction errors.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Artifact growth and policy exceptions remain moderate.","Reviews are periodic rather than continuously staffed.","Existing infrastructure absorbs storage and routine software costs.","Material disputes, erasure obligations, or major migrations would require additional resources."]}},"research_burden":"MODERATE","earliest_credible_horizon":"0_TO_3_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"The packet identifies observable coexistence of dated guidance lacking authority labels, successor links, validity intervals, or dependency records, and specifies retrieval and annotation consequences that can be audited. Its prevalence and materiality are not yet established."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The corpus owner and annotation-governance board are identified as authorities for active status, with records or compliance clearance required for destruction."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The proposal claims that lifecycle labeling and demotion can reduce obsolete-rule retrieval without harming reconstruction, compared with the baseline and the version-history-plus-ranking rival; both benefit and harm outcomes are falsifiable."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"The sealed candidate authorizes an eight-week, read-only pilot on one project with at most 100 artifacts, separate-index labels, dependency tracing, comparisons, and no alteration or deletion."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"The first step stays within named authority, excludes deletion and contested or dependency-uncertain disposition, and includes halting and rollback for reconstruction failure, unresolved holds or objections, and increased erroneous retrieval."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"YES","reason":"The one-project, 100-artifact, eight-week scope supports a broad resource band for first evidence, although deployment and recurring ranges remain low-confidence because integration and review complexity are unspecified."}},"blocking_evidence":["A representative audit must establish whether unlabeled legacy guidance is encountered and acted upon often enough to contribute materially to inconsistency.","Artifact identity resolution and dependency tracing must achieve sufficient coverage to avoid broken references or false authority assignments.","The lifecycle intervention must outperform both baseline discovery and the immutable-history-plus-ranking rival on obsolete-rule retrieval or blinded annotation agreement.","Reconstruction time, missing-reference incidents, erroneous retrieval, and stakeholder disputes must not worsen under the intervention.","Corpus owners, governance boards, affected communities, and records or integrity stakeholders must accept the operational-versus-scholarly authority distinction.","External research is required before claiming distinctiveness relative to existing corpus-governance, versioning, and records-lifecycle practices."],"next_evidence_step":"Run the authorized eight-week read-only pilot on one annotation project with at most 100 identity-resolved guidance artifacts. In counterbalanced retrieval and reconstruction tasks, compare the current baseline, the nearest rival of immutable history plus current-document ranking, and separate-index lifecycle labels with reversible demotion. Falsify progression if labels do not reduce obsolete-guidance retrieval or improve blinded annotation agreement, or if reconstruction time, missing-reference incidents, erroneous retrieval, or stakeholder disputes worsen.","research_questions":["How often do annotators or analysts encounter and act on unlabeled superseded guidance?","What share of observed disagreement is explained by obsolete authority rather than ambiguous current rules, task design, or inadequate training?","Can artifacts, successors, validity contexts, and dependencies be resolved reliably enough for safe lifecycle decisions?","Do lifecycle labels and reversible demotion outperform improved ranking alone on retrieval and blinded annotation outcomes?","Can governance distinguish operational authority from enduring scholarly value without suppressing dialectal, historical, minority-language, or theoretical plurality?","What metadata, tombstone, and quarantine information could disclose sensitive provenance or conflict with valid erasure obligations?","Which existing corpus-governance, documentation-versioning, and records-lifecycle practices overlap with the proposed package?"],"recommendation":"PILOT_NOW","uncertainty_constraints":["Closed-book assessment provides no external evidence of problem prevalence, stakeholder demand, realized impact, or market size.","Prior art is unsearched, so world distinctiveness and incremental novelty are unmeasured.","All effectiveness claims remain hypotheses; no measured retrieval, agreement, reconstruction, or dispute outcomes are supplied.","Cost bands are resource-equivalent estimates based only on the bounded scope and stated actors, not observed procurement or labor data.","Authority may be distributed across communities even where a corpus owner and governance board hold formal operational control.","Scaling may fail where artifact identities, dependencies, ownership, or context-specific validity cannot be resolved."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"The packet supports comparison only with its stated baseline and nearest rival. It does not establish whether lifecycle-governed annotation authority, dependency-gated disposition, quarantine, tombstones, or restore testing already exist in corpus governance, documentation systems, archival practice, or records management; no novelty or prevalence claim is warranted."}