{"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__neuroscience","archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"neuroscience","title":"Reversible lifecycle governance for longitudinal neural data","opportunity_summary":"The proposal would inventory and classify neural-data versions, gate retirement on lineage and governance checks, and use reversible tiering, quarantine, audit, and restoration testing. It could improve authoritative-version selection and reduce active-storage burden relative to labels-only retention, but the sealed candidate does not establish problem prevalence, stakeholder demand, comparative effect size, prior-art distinctiveness, or institution-scale feasibility.","adopter_authorizer":"The accountable principal investigator and institutional data steward are the proposed adopters and approvers, subject to veto by ethics, consent, privacy, records, and investigation authorities.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":3,"rationale":"Stale derivatives, impaired reproducibility, avoidable retrieval effort, and unsafe cleanup could be consequential, especially for irreproducible recordings, but the candidate provides no evidence that these burdens are frequent or material in the target programs."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"Investigators, stewards, analysts, and governance officers are identifiable beneficiaries, but the sealed candidate contains no interviews, commitments, observed demand, or evidence that they prioritize lifecycle retirement over continued retention."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":4,"rationale":"Unlike the labels-only rival, the proposal adds dependency-gated tiering, reversible retirement, restoration testing, and periodic revalidation, creating a clear and testable path to lower active-resource burden while preserving recovery."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The neuroscience-specific combination of authority states, lineage gates, governance vetoes, and reversible restoration is coherent, but prior art is explicitly unsearched and distinctiveness cannot be established closed-book."},"technical_implementability":{"score":3,"rationale":"A read-only inventory and offline restoration test are technically bounded, but reliable identity resolution, external-dependency discovery, format-preserving compaction, and lineage reconnection may be difficult across heterogeneous neural-data systems."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The proposal identifies accountable approvers and veto holders, but adoption requires coordination across investigators, data stewardship, ethics, privacy, records, and potentially investigation authorities with possibly incompatible requirements."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"The candidate supplies a 90-day study boundary, an explicit baseline and rival, measurable intermediate outcomes, separate problem and intervention falsifiers, and restoration and governance stop conditions."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"Quarantine, tombstones, audit records, integrity checks, tested restoration, veto authority, and explicit exclusion of raw-signal deletion materially reduce the risks of improvised cleanup, although metadata leakage, archive decay, and hidden dependencies remain possible."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Lifecycle states, policies, and audit mechanisms could be reused, but study-specific consent, unique raw signals, heterogeneous formats, uncertain dependencies, and manual governance review may limit economical scaling."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"A 90-day, read-only pilot on one completed study, including inventory and lineage work, lifecycle labeling, baseline comparison, simulated tiering, governance review, and restoration and integrity tests on offline copies.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["The study is completed and accessible to the authorized team.","The data volume and number of deposits are moderate rather than institution-scale.","Existing storage and catalog systems can export sufficient metadata.","Specialist data-engineering, neuroscience, stewardship, and governance labor is included."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Design and configure a minimally viable lifecycle process for one neuroscience program after favorable pilot evidence, including policies, authority states, audit logging, tier interfaces, and operating procedures.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Existing identity, storage, and access-control platforms can be adapted.","No custom institutional archive or major format migration is required.","Raw or uniquely irreproducible recordings remain outside automatic retirement.","Institutional review does not require extensive new compliance infrastructure."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Production launch across one multi-study neuroscience program, including repository integration, backlog inventory, lineage remediation, controlled migrations, staff training, governance approvals, monitoring, and launch evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Scope is one program rather than an entire institution or consortium.","A substantial historical backlog requires manual exception handling.","Cold storage and restoration services already exist or can be procured without new major equipment.","No destructive disposition proceeds where consent, dependency, or authority is unresolved."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Ongoing stewardship for one program, including lifecycle reviews, exception management, archive monitoring, restoration drills, audit retention, software operations, governance coordination, and outcome evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Data growth and review volume remain moderate.","Most classifications can be maintained without continuous manual reconstruction of lineage.","Storage charges are included but no unusually large recording modality dominates.","Periodic restoration testing remains sample-based rather than exhaustive."]}},"research_burden":"HIGH","earliest_credible_horizon":"3_TO_12_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The candidate describes observable stale-version, storage, and reproducibility failure modes, but supplies no external evidence that they occur materially in the proposed adopter setting."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The accountable principal investigator and institutional data steward are explicitly assigned approval authority, with named ethics, privacy, consent, records, and investigation veto holders."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"Dependency-gated lifecycle labeling and simulated tiering can be compared with current retention or labels-only cataloging on authoritative-version selection, retrieval effort, projected hot-tier demand, and restoration integrity."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"A single completed study, a 90-day duration, read-only inventory, offline simulation, sampled restoration, explicit comparisons, and stated falsifiers bound the proposed evidence step without source-data destruction."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The design includes strong exclusions and rollback rules, but study-specific consent, records, investigation, dependency, and metadata-disclosure constraints must be reviewed before even reversible demotion is authorized."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The one-study pilot has a usable scope, but repository size, deposit count, lineage quality, system interfaces, staffing, retention obligations, and production rollout boundary are unspecified, leaving implementation ranges assumption-dependent."}},"blocking_evidence":["Whether a completed-study inventory demonstrates material stale-version use, authoritative-version confusion, retrieval burden, or avoidable hot-tier consumption.","Whether identities, lineage, ownership, and internal and external dependencies can be resolved accurately enough to classify regenerable derivatives without endangering unique evidence.","Whether consent, ethics, privacy, records, publication, and investigation rules permit the proposed lifecycle states, tombstones, quarantine, and reversible demotion.","Whether the proposal outperforms improved cataloging and version labels on decision-relevant outcomes without restoration, integrity, lineage, or governance failures.","Whether prospective users and authorizers consider the burden important enough to fund and operate the process.","Whether existing neuroscience repositories or governance practices already provide materially equivalent capabilities."],"next_evidence_step":"Conduct the proposed 90-day read-only pilot on one authorized completed study. Compare the current or labels-only workflow with lifecycle labeling and offline simulated tiering on authoritative-version selection accuracy and time, retrieval effort, and projected hot-tier demand; restore-test a predefined sample of copied non-sensitive derivatives and verify checksums, lineage reconnection, and governance eligibility. Reject progression if the baseline problem is negligible, measured outcomes do not improve, or any sampled item fails restoration, integrity, lineage, dependency, or governance review.","research_questions":["How often do analysts select superseded derivatives, and what scientific or operational consequences result?","What proportion of accumulated material is unique raw evidence, reproducible derivative output, protected governance evidence, or safely recoverable archival material?","Can internal and external dependencies be identified with sufficient sensitivity to avoid false orphan classifications?","Does lifecycle governance add measurable benefit beyond authoritative labels and improved cataloging while retaining all deposits on their current tiers?","What consent, ethics, privacy, records, publication, and investigation requirements constrain quarantine, tombstones, tiering, restoration, or disposition?","What staffing, system-integration, storage, and recurring-review burden arises at program scale?","What existing tools, repository practices, or published approaches constitute relevant prior art?","Do investigators, stewards, analysts, and governance officers authorize and value an operational pilot after reviewing the read-only results?"],"recommendation":"VALIDATE_PROBLEM_FIRST","uncertainty_constraints":["Problem prevalence, burden magnitude, and stakeholder demand are unsupported in the sealed input.","Prior art and world-level distinctiveness are unmeasured.","Future scientific value is not reliably monotonic with age, particularly for unique neural recordings.","Implementation feasibility depends on unmeasured lineage completeness, external dependencies, repository heterogeneity, and archive reliability.","Cost bands are resource-equivalent planning ranges based on stated scopes, not observed quotes or exact estimates.","Governance feasibility remains study- and institution-specific.","Projected storage savings cannot establish net benefit without valuing stewardship effort, cold-tier latency, restoration risk, and lost option value."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"No claim is made that the proposal is novel, uncommon, superior to existing neuroscience repository practices, or absent from commercial or institutional data-lifecycle systems. Prior-art status remains UNSEARCHED, and this assessment uses only the sealed candidate's internal comparison with labels-only retention."}