{"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__marine_science","archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"marine_science","title":"Governed lifecycle management for ocean-observatory data layers","opportunity_summary":"A governed lifecycle could distinguish authoritative ocean-observatory products from superseded layers, preserve lineage through holds, tombstones, archives, and restore tests, and reduce obsolete-data selection and active-tier stewardship burden. The candidate is well specified and safely testable, but the prevalence and materiality of the problem, intervention effects, and distinctiveness from existing repository practice are unverified.","adopter_authorizer":"Operational adoption would require joint authorization by the observatory data steward, repository custodian, responsible principal investigator, and applicable records, ethics, or data-governance authorities; repository staff and scientific users would be principal adopters.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":4,"rationale":"If the hypothesized obsolete-version use and stewardship burden are material, preventing analyses with superseded calibrations while preserving reconstruction could substantially improve scientific reliability and resource use; prevalence and effect magnitude remain unsupported."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":3,"rationale":"The proposal addresses concrete concerns for stewards, repository operators, and scientists, including version ambiguity, storage growth, and reproducibility, but the packet supplies no observed demand, complaints, adoption commitments, or quantified burden."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":4,"rationale":"Relative to equal active treatment and to version-label improvements alone, the proposal adds dependency vetoes, governed tiering, exception handling, tombstones, restore drills, and periodic revalidation; whether these additions produce material net benefit is untested."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"The composition is coherent and domain-specific, but prior-art status is explicitly UNSEARCHED and the packet provides no basis for distinguishing it from established preservation, retention, versioning, or repository-lifecycle practices."},"technical_implementability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Inventory, checksums, status metadata, tiering, tombstones, and restore sampling use plausible repository operations, but resolving historical identities, citations, derivation dependencies, formats, credentials, and lossless reconstruction may be difficult."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"Named authorities and halt rules make authorization pathways identifiable, but joint approval across scientific, repository, records, ethics, and governed-community interests could be slow and may leave disputed disposition authority."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"The candidate specifies a bounded instrument-year audit, a baseline comparison, observable outcomes, problem and intervention falsifiers, and restore testing without permanent deletion; valid outcome measures and representative sampling still require design work."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"Dependency vetoes, holds, tombstones, quarantine, checksums, restore drills, halt conditions, and rollback directly reduce the risk of irrecoverable deletion or broken scientific lineage, although archive and tooling decay remain possible."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Rules and lifecycle states could extend across instruments and years, but heterogeneous metadata, governance restrictions, processing pipelines, citations, and archive formats may require substantial local review and limit automation."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Read-only audit of one completed instrument-year, including version inventory, lineage and citation checks, simulated dispositions, baseline comparison, outcome measurement, and restoration of a stratified sample.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Existing catalog, access-log, storage, and archive records can be accessed without major procurement.","The instrument-year is bounded but contains enough versions and dependencies to require specialist steward, repository, and scientific labor.","No permanent deletion, production migration, or broad policy implementation occurs."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Design and implementation of lifecycle states, authority metadata, dependency vetoes, holds, tombstones, tiering workflows, audit logging, policy review, and integrations for an initial observatory deployment.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Core repository and archive infrastructure already exists.","Historical metadata needs material cleanup but not complete reconstruction of every legacy pipeline.","Legal, ethics, sovereignty, records, and funder review can use existing institutional processes."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Production rollout across selected observatory collections, including backlog triage, user communication, training, archive transfer and validation, monitoring, exception handling, and launch evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Launch is limited to one observatory rather than a multi-institution network.","Most eligible layers can be tiered or quarantined using existing storage services.","High-risk and unresolved collections remain held rather than forcing disposition."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Ongoing lifecycle review, exception revalidation, dependency updates, archive integrity checks, restore drills, tombstone maintenance, user support, monitoring, and incremental storage or retrieval charges.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Automation handles routine state changes while staff review exceptions.","The retained corpus and restore frequency remain within existing archive capacity.","No major format migration, archive replacement, or large-scale recovery event occurs in a typical year."]}},"research_burden":"HIGH","earliest_credible_horizon":"3_TO_12_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"YES","reason":"The candidate defines observable manifestations—ambiguous search results, access to superseded products, hot-storage growth, disposition backlogs, and unresolved dependencies—and provides a representative-audit falsifier, although actual prevalence is unknown."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The packet names operational users and jointly responsible authorities: data stewards, repository custodians, principal investigators, records or ethics authorities, and affected data governors."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"Compared with equal active treatment or improved labels alone, the proposal claims that governed states, dependency vetoes, tiering, tombstones, and restore validation will reduce obsolete-version selection or review burden without breaking citations, dependencies, retrieval, or reconstruction."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"A read-only pilot on one completed instrument-year is explicitly bounded, prohibits permanent deletion, compares simulated lifecycle handling with the current baseline, and includes problem and intervention rejection conditions."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"The first step is non-destructive and subject to joint authority, holds, affected-party control, explicit exclusions, halt triggers, and rollback; unresolved identity, dependency, authority, or restore failure stops action rather than permitting disposition."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"YES","reason":"A bounded pilot and staged observatory deployment can be scoped into resource-equivalent bands, though the ranges remain low-confidence because corpus size, metadata quality, integrations, governance effort, and archive capacity are unspecified."}},"blocking_evidence":["A representative audit has not established whether superseded products are selected often enough, or whether search, storage, and stewardship burdens are material.","The completeness and resolvability of version identity, derivation lineage, citations, holds, and governance restrictions are unknown.","No comparative evidence shows that the full lifecycle composition outperforms improved version labeling or current manual stewardship without unacceptable retrieval or reconstruction harms.","Archive recoverability, checksum integrity, credential durability, format longevity, and acceptable retrieval delay have not been demonstrated for the target corpus.","Prior art is unsearched, so distinctiveness from existing repository preservation and data-lifecycle practices cannot be assessed."],"next_evidence_step":"Run the authorized read-only pilot on one completed instrument-year: compare current catalog behavior and manual review with simulated governed lifecycle states plus dependency vetoes, measuring superseded-version selection, steward review effort, active-tier footprint, citation and dependency failures, retrieval delay, and reconstruction success. Reject the diagnosed problem if the audit finds negligible obsolete-version use and burden with explicit lifecycle states, complete lineage, and routinely successful restores; reject the intervention if it fails to improve selection or review outcomes or performs worse than baseline on citations, dependencies, retrieval, or reconstruction.","research_questions":["How often are superseded releases discovered, accessed, or selected instead of authoritative versions, and by which user groups?","What proportion of active storage and stewardship work is attributable to genuinely superseded layers rather than legitimate alternative processing or uniquely valuable historical observations?","Can version identities, citations, derivation dependencies, holds, and applicable governance authority be resolved reliably for a representative instrument-year?","Does the full lifecycle approach improve obsolete-version selection and review burden relative to improved version labels alone and current manual practice?","What retrieval-delay, reconstruction-success, checksum-integrity, and citation-resolution thresholds would affected scientists and authorities consider acceptable?","Which existing repository preservation, versioning, retention, and lifecycle practices overlap with or distinguish the proposed composition?","How much manual exception review persists after automation, and how do costs and error rates change across heterogeneous instruments and collections?","Do tombstones, exceptions, and cold-storage dependencies remain usable and governable over repeated revalidation and restore cycles?"],"recommendation":"VALIDATE_PROBLEM_FIRST","uncertainty_constraints":["Closed-book assessment with no external evidence of prevalence, stakeholder demand, prior art, market size, realized impact, or exact cost.","The candidate's problem and causal effects are explicitly hypotheses rather than observed results.","Cost bands are resource-equivalent planning ranges, not vendor quotes or point estimates.","Older or rarely accessed observations may remain scientifically unique and valuable; age alone cannot establish supersession or declining retention value.","The assessment supports only a read-only evidence step, not live disposition or deletion."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"Prior-art status is UNSEARCHED. This assessment makes no claim that the governed lifecycle composition is novel, rare, or absent from ocean observatories, scientific repositories, digital preservation systems, records management, or data-versioning practice."}