{"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__literature_literary_theory","archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"literature_literary_theory","title":"Lifecycle states for interpretive layers in living critical editions","opportunity_summary":"Introduce reviewable lifecycle states that refresh, supersede, demote, archive, or quarantine stale interpretive layers while preserving citation markers, provenance, and restoration. The proposal addresses a coherent editorial-governance tension, but the prevalence of consequential staleness, user demand, comparative benefit, and distinctiveness from existing edition practices remain unestablished.","adopter_authorizer":"The accountable editorial board and maintainers of a living digital critical edition, with institutional archive or rights review for contested or irreversible dispositions.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Preventing obsolete claims from appearing current while preserving reception history could improve interpretation, citation, and maintenance, but the sealed candidate provides no evidence about the frequency or severity of these harms."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"Editors, scholars, readers, students, and downstream citers are identified, but no stakeholder requests, observed complaints, adoption commitments, or demonstrated willingness to assume recurring review work are supplied."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":4,"rationale":"Relative to indefinite activation or metadata and ranking alone, explicit lifecycle states add dependency checks, differentiated reversible disposition, retained markers, restoration, and scheduled revalidation; whether these improve outcomes remains untested."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"The combination is internally coherent, but prior art is explicitly unsearched and may overlap substantially with annotation versioning, archival governance, dated displays, scholarly apparatus, and editorial workflow practices."},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"Inventory fields, status labels, supersession links, reversible visibility controls, audit logs, and restoration tests are feasible extensions to a versioned digital-edition platform, although legacy data quality and citation dependencies may complicate integration."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":4,"rationale":"The edition's editorial board is a plausible decision authority, and the proposal specifies archive or rights review, prohibited actions, halt conditions, and rollback; contested scholarly judgments could still slow approval."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"A single-work sample capped at 200 layers, a current-interface comparison, measurable interpretation and discovery outcomes, and explicit problem and intervention falsifiers provide a bounded test design, though operational definitions require development."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":5,"rationale":"Quarantine, retained markers, audit logs, restoration, citation checks, provenance checks, exclusions against automatic deletion and silent rewriting, and explicit halt conditions directly limit loss and viewpoint-suppression risks during testing."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"The state model and interface controls could be reused across editions, but classification depends on context-sensitive scholarly judgment, exception review, rights constraints, citation tracing, and recurrent revalidation that may scale poorly."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Inventory and label no more than 200 layers from one work, prepare a reversible lifecycle-interface prototype, run a counterbalanced reader comparison against the current interface, and audit citation, provenance, and restoration outcomes.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["An existing edition and usable annotation export are available.","The pilot modifies visibility only and requires no production migration.","A small reader sample and limited editorial adjudication are sufficient for directional evidence.","No unusually complex rights review is triggered."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Design and implement lifecycle metadata, supersession and dependency links, editorial review workflows, reversible visibility controls, retained markers, audit logging, permissions, and restoration tests in one existing edition platform.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The platform is maintainable and already supports versioned records and access controls.","This covers one institution and one principal edition platform.","Legacy metadata requires targeted cleanup rather than full reconstruction.","No exact annotation volume or integration complexity is known."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Train editors, triage an initial bounded corpus, adjudicate exceptions, validate citations and rights, conduct accessibility and user testing, document governance, and release lifecycle-treated content with monitoring and rollback support.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Launch covers a moderate-sized living edition rather than an institution-wide portfolio.","Most records can be reviewed without extensive external scholarly consultation.","Irreversible deletion remains outside scope.","Existing hosting and preservation infrastructure can be reused."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Recurring editorial review, exception and dispute handling, citation and link validation, rights coordination, revalidation schedules, audit-log retention, restoration exercises, software maintenance, and outcome monitoring for one active edition program.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Human editorial judgment remains necessary for lifecycle decisions.","Annotation deposition continues throughout the year.","The estimate represents resource-equivalent labor and infrastructure, not incremental cash alone.","Edition scale and review frequency are unspecified."]}},"research_burden":"MODERATE","earliest_credible_horizon":"3_TO_12_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The editorial tension is recognizable and has a clear falsifier, but the sealed candidate supplies no observed incidence, user-error data, maintenance burden, or stakeholder testimony showing that stale-layer harm is material in an actual edition."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The accountable editorial board is explicitly assigned decision authority, with archive or rights review for contested or irreversible disposition."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The candidate claims that lifecycle treatment will improve recognition of current versus historical claims beyond the current interface while preserving references and provenance; it specifies failure if those gains do not occur or harms increase."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"The authorized first step is limited to one work and at most 200 layers, permits only reversible demotion, names the current interface as comparator, and includes interpretation, citation, provenance, and rollback outcomes."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"For the bounded pilot, accountable authority, affected parties, excluded actions, halt triggers, quarantine, audit logging, and restoration are specified; rights-held or dependency-uncertain records are excluded from removal."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The pilot scope is bounded, but production corpus size, platform architecture, metadata quality, review cadence, staffing, rights complexity, and institutional rollout scope are absent, making implementation and recurring ranges highly assumption-dependent."}},"blocking_evidence":["Observed frequency and consequence of stale or superseded layers in a real living edition, including whether users already recognize dated commentary reliably.","Comparative evidence that lifecycle treatment improves correct current-versus-historical interpretation beyond the current interface and the nearest rival of better metadata, ranking, and dated-version display.","Evidence that editorial classifications are sufficiently consistent and do not merely encode current preference or suppress legitimate minority interpretations.","Measured editorial workload, exception rate, citation-dependency complexity, and recurring revalidation burden.","Bounded prior-art findings distinguishing the proposed combination from existing annotation-versioning, digital-edition, scholarly-apparatus, and archival-governance practices.","Demonstration that citations, scholarly credit, provenance, rights obligations, and restoration remain intact under reversible demotion."],"next_evidence_step":"On one work, sample no more than 200 deposited layers and have at least two editors independently propose lifecycle states while recording disagreements, dependencies, holds, and review time. Then run counterbalanced reader tasks comparing the current interface, the nearest-rival metadata and dated-display treatment, and a reversible lifecycle-state prototype. Measure stale-item discovery, correct identification of current versus historical claims, citation continuity, provenance reconstruction, confusion, and editorial burden. Falsify progression if stale harm is rare, lifecycle treatment does not outperform the rival, classification agreement is inadequate, or any reference, provenance, rights, or restoration failure occurs.","research_questions":["How often do sampled layers meet prospectively defined stale or superseded criteria, and what measurable reader or maintenance harm follows?","Do readers already distinguish historical from current commentary using existing dates and metadata?","Does lifecycle treatment outperform improved metadata, ranking, and dated-version display rather than merely outperforming the weakest baseline?","Can editors distinguish supersession from disagreement with acceptable consistency, and how are contested or resurgent interpretations handled?","What review time, exception rate, dependency tracing, rights coordination, and revalidation burden does the workflow create?","Which lifecycle functions or combinations are already established in digital-edition, annotation-versioning, scholarly-apparatus, and archival-governance practice?","Can demoted layers be restored with citations, scholarly credit, provenance, and interface context intact?","What evidence would justify adoption by an editorial board and continued participation by annotators and cited scholars?],"],"recommendation":"PRIOR_ART_RESEARCH","uncertainty_constraints":["This is a closed-book assessment with no external evidence of prevalence, demand, prior art, adoption, realized impact, market size, or exact cost.","The candidate is a hypothesis; no comparative results or production deployment evidence are supplied.","Interpretive value does not decay monotonically, so age cannot validate a lifecycle classification.","Cost bands depend strongly on edition size, platform architecture, metadata quality, rights obligations, and required editorial review.","Stakeholder pull and willingness to accept visibility governance or recurring review work are unknown.","Distinctiveness cannot be established while prior-art status remains unsearched."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"No claim is made that lifecycle states, supersession links, reversible demotion, quarantine, audit logs, archival markers, or their combination are novel or uncommon. The sealed packet explicitly marks prior art as unsearched; comparison with existing digital-edition, annotation-versioning, scholarly-apparatus, preservation, and archival-governance practices requires external research."}