{"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__religious_studies_theology","archetype_slug":"layer_decay_and_expiration_management","domain_slug":"religious_studies_theology","title":"Explicit lifecycle states for institutional religious guidance corpora","opportunity_summary":"Evaluate whether document-level current, superseded, uncertain, historical, and withdrawn states—paired with successor links and preservation controls—help users identify current institutional guidance without erasing historical layers. The proposal is structurally plausible and safely testable, but the prevalence of retrieval errors, stakeholder demand, authority feasibility, and distinctiveness from existing practice are unestablished.","adopter_authorizer":"A religious institution that owns the corpus and can authorize status declarations for its own documents, working with qualified archivists, records or legal officers, and affected-party reviewers for contested or community-sensitive cases.","scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":4,"rationale":"If users currently apply or attribute superseded doctrinal, ritual, ethical, or pastoral guidance as current, improving status identification could materially reduce consequential interpretation errors while preserving evidence for accountability and scholarship. The frequency and magnitude of those errors remain hypotheses."},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":2,"rationale":"The candidate identifies adherents, clergy, scholars, educators, archivists, and corpus owners as affected actors, but provides no evidence of complaints, adoption requests, budget commitment, or willingness to assume the added governance burden."},"incremental_advantage":{"score":4,"rationale":"Relative to the specified rival of a current-documents page plus recency ranking, document-level lifecycle states, persistent successor links, dependency checks, preservation pathways, and restore tests offer a clear and testable functional increment. Whether that increment produces sufficient real-world benefit is untested."},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":2,"rationale":"The configuration is coherent and tailored to plural authority and archival preservation, but prior art is explicitly unsearched across archival description, records retention, versioned publishing, and institutional repository governance; distinctiveness therefore cannot be inferred."},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"Provisional banners, successor links, catalog snapshots, retrieval tasks, and dependency checks can be implemented without deleting or altering documents. Identity resolution, inconsistent metadata, restricted records, and legacy search integrations may complicate execution but do not make the bounded pilot technically implausible."},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The proposal appropriately limits corpus owners to declaring the institutional status of their own documents and assigns preservation and hold decisions to qualified roles. Feasibility is mixed because internally plural authority, contested applicability, and affected-party objections may prevent stable classification in some corpora."},"evidence_readiness":{"score":4,"rationale":"The candidate specifies observable metadata defects, predefined retrieval outcomes, separate problem and intervention falsifiers, a 100-document comparison, harm measures, and rollback conditions. Representativeness, tolerances, sampling details, and demonstrated partner access remain unspecified."},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"Read-only provisional labeling, no deletion or deindexing, preserved historical discovery, dependency gates, catalog snapshots, halt triggers, and rollback directly reduce risks of erasure and irreversible misclassification. Nominal archiving could still reduce practical discoverability or reinforce institutional power."},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"Lifecycle metadata and successor-link patterns could extend across document classes and repositories, but each expansion requires class-specific retention rules, authority review, exception handling, preservation validation, and potentially affected-party consultation. Those governance requirements may scale less readily than the technical mechanism."}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"Eight-week read-only study of 100 documents from two document classes, including inventory and identity resolution, provisional labels and successor links, predefined retrieval tasks, dispute and dependency review, curator-time measurement, snapshot and rollback preparation, and analysis.","confidence":"MODERATE","assumptions":["An institution supplies authorized reviewers and access to a usable corpus.","No production deletion, irreversible deindexing, or restricted-record publication occurs.","Existing repository interfaces can display provisional banners with limited configuration.","The study uses a modest participant sample and does not require extensive legal proceedings."]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Design and configure lifecycle policy, metadata fields, authority workflows, preservation and hold checks, successor-link management, search presentation, audit records, training, and initial corpus inventory for one institution.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["The corpus is moderate in size and has exportable metadata.","Major repository replacement is unnecessary.","Most documents can be reviewed through established institutional roles.","Contested and restricted cases are routed to exception workflows rather than resolved during startup."]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Production classification and quality review for an initial bounded corpus, integration with repository and search systems, archival and restore validation, affected-party review of flagged cases, user communication, and launch evaluation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Launch is limited to one institution and selected document classes.","No large-scale digitization or reconstruction of missing archives is required.","Search and catalog integrations expose supported metadata interfaces.","Legal, records-hold, and community-sensitive cases remain a minority of the initial corpus."]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Recurring reviewer and curator labor, periodic status review, exception and dispute handling, successor-link maintenance, dependency and access checks, archive restore tests, user-support corrections, software operation, and outcome monitoring for one institution.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Review volume is moderate and concentrated on changed or expiring classifications.","The institution retains qualified archival and governance personnel.","Repository hosting and preservation infrastructure already exist.","The number of contested authority cases does not require a dedicated large adjudication program."]}},"research_burden":"HIGH","earliest_credible_horizon":"3_TO_12_MONTHS","pipeline_gates":{"recognizable_externally_supportable_problem":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The packet defines an observable error—selection or citation of a superseded item as the current institutional position—and supplies a direct falsifier, but it provides no external or representative evidence that the error occurs often enough or causes material burden."},"identifiable_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"The corpus-owning religious institution is the adopter; its issuing authorities may declare the current institutional status of their own documents, while archivists, records or legal officers, and affected-party reviewers hold defined complementary authority."},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The proposal claims that document-level lifecycle labels, successor links, and governed search presentation will improve correct current-document selection relative to ad hoc updates or a current-documents page with recency ranking, without exceeding preset harm and burden tolerances."},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"An eight-week, read-only pilot on 100 documents from two classes is specified, with a baseline comparison, retrieval outcomes, dispute and dependency measures, explicit falsifiers, halt conditions, snapshot restoration, and no deletion or deindexing."},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The reversible pilot has substantial safeguards, but the candidate itself identifies inability to establish status authority, represent plural applicability, preserve archives independently, or resolve affected-party objections as possible stopping conditions that require partner-level evidence."},"implementation_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"YES","reason":"The 100-document pilot and a one-institution initial deployment can be bounded sufficiently for broad resource-equivalent bands, although corpus size, metadata quality, integration complexity, and dispute volume keep deployment and recurring estimates at low confidence."}},"blocking_evidence":["Representative evidence of how often users mistake superseded documents for current institutional guidance and whether the resulting burden is material.","Evidence that issuing authority and plural applicability can be documented for the sampled document classes without converting lifecycle labels into judgments of theological truth.","Comparative pilot results showing improved correct current-document selection without unacceptable misclassification, contested erasure, broken citations or dependencies, restricted-data exposure, or curator burden.","Evidence that historical materials remain practically discoverable and restorable after lifecycle presentation changes, rather than merely preserved in name.","Prior-art findings establishing whether the proposed configuration adds a meaningful increment beyond existing archival, records-retention, versioned-publishing, and religious-repository practices.","Adopter evidence that a corpus owner and the required archival, legal, records, and affected-party reviewers are willing and able to operate the governance process."],"next_evidence_step":"With one corpus-owning institution, run the specified eight-week read-only study on a stratified 100-document sample from two document classes. Compare baseline repository presentation with provisional lifecycle banners and successor links on predefined current-guidance retrieval tasks; falsify the problem if baseline status is already consistent and users make no material current-status errors, and reject the intervention if selection accuracy does not improve or preset tolerances for disputes, misclassification, broken dependencies or citations, restricted-data exposure, archival discoverability, or curator time are exceeded.","research_questions":["What proportion of a representative inventory lacks consistent status, successor, review-date, authority, or archival metadata?","How often do intended users select or cite a superseded item when asked for the current institutional position under baseline presentation?","Can lifecycle status and plural applicability be represented without implying centralized theological authority or suppressing minoritized interpretations?","Which roles can document issuing authority, approve exceptions, govern preservation and holds, and resolve affected-party objections for each document class?","Does provisional labeling improve correct current-document selection relative to ad hoc updates and recency-oriented presentation?","What rates of disputed classification, broken dependencies or citations, restricted-data exposure, and reduced historical discoverability does the intervention produce?","How much curator and reviewer time is required per document and per contested case?","What materially similar mechanisms already exist in archival description, records retention, versioned publishing, institutional repositories, or contested-authority metadata models?"],"recommendation":"VALIDATE_PROBLEM_FIRST","uncertainty_constraints":["Closed-book assessment with no external evidence of prevalence, stakeholder demand, realized impact, prior art, market size, or exact implementation cost.","The consequence of users applying or attributing obsolete guidance as current is explicitly presented as a hypothesis.","Costs are broad resource-equivalent bands and are highly sensitive to corpus size, metadata quality, repository integration, review labor, restricted-record handling, and dispute volume.","The approach may not fit traditions or institutions where authority is plural, documents coexist normatively, or no actor can legitimately assign a singular lifecycle state.","A technically preserved archive may still become less practically discoverable after search or presentation changes.","The proposal's incremental advantage is assessed only against its stated rival, not against unknown external practices."],"closed_book_prior_art_boundary":"Prior-art status is UNSEARCHED. This assessment makes no claim that lifecycle metadata, successor links, archival governance, contested-authority models, or their combination are novel, rare, or absent from existing religious institutions, libraries, archives, records-management systems, or versioned publishing platforms."}