{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__criminology_forensic","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"evidence_continuity_record_contract_v0","proposal_index":1,"version":0,"title":"Representation-Independent Evidence Continuity Record","problem":"A forensic organization may replace or connect evidence-tracking implementations that encode custody, seal, sampling, consumption, and correction histories differently. When downstream users rely on database tables, vendor status codes, display order, mutable notes, or other representation details, two systems can present materially different continuity histories while both appear to contain the same evidence records. The organization then lacks a representation-independent rule for deciding whether a migrated or alternative implementation preserves the evidentiary meaning of the record.","actors":["Evidence intake personnel","Evidence custodians","Forensic examiners","Laboratory quality managers","Investigators","Prosecutors and defense reviewers who inspect authorized record exports","Case-management and laboratory-system maintainers"],"observable_state":"Given the same sequence of evidence-handling actions, incumbent and candidate systems can disagree through their public outputs about the current custodian, whether a transfer remains unresolved, whether a seal was open during an interval, which sample derives from which parent item, how much material remains, or whether a later correction replaced versus concealed an earlier assertion. Users may also infer meaning from undocumented row order, internal status values, editable identifiers, or omitted events.","consequence":"A system change or cross-system handoff can alter the apparent continuity or condition of an item without any corresponding change in the physical evidence. This can prompt avoidable reconciliation work, misdirect later handling, obscure an unresolved discontinuity, or cause reviewers to reach different procedural conclusions from records intended to denote the same history.","affected_objective":"Preserve the reviewable meaning, integrity constraints, and authorized observability of an evidence item’s continuity record when its storage representation or implementation changes.","intervention":"Define an Evidence Continuity Record as an abstract state machine rather than as a database schema. Its public operations include registering an item, offering and accepting a transfer, recording seal opening and resealing, deriving a child sample, recording authorized consumption, appending a correction linked to the assertion it qualifies, retrieving the current abstract state, rendering an authorized chronological history, and checking specified continuity conditions. Preconditions, postconditions, allowed errors, authorization context, and side-effect limits accompany every operation. Core invariants include unique stable item identity; one current accountable custodian at most; no completed transfer without matched offer and acceptance; no negative remaining quantity; every child sample linked to one registered parent; corrections preserved alongside the qualified assertion; and no silent deletion of an accepted event. Database layout, vendor codes, cache state, internal event keys, indexing, and physical ordering remain hidden. Any implementation is substitutable only after it passes the same black-box conformance suite, including generated operation sequences and leakage checks.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Abstract component","domain_realization":"The Evidence Continuity Record for one physical item and its derived samples."},{"archetype_element":"Observable operation surface","domain_realization":"Register, offer transfer, accept transfer, open seal, reseal, derive sample, record consumption, append correction, query current abstract state, render authorized history, and evaluate named continuity conditions."},{"archetype_element":"Abstract state and transitions","domain_realization":"A stable item identity, accountable-custody state, pending transfers, seal state, parent-child sample relations, quantity accounting, append-preserved assertions and corrections, and transitions permitted only by specified operations."},{"archetype_element":"Behavioral laws and invariants","domain_realization":"Matched transfers determine custody; querying does not mutate the record; rejected operations leave abstract state unchanged; consumption cannot exceed recorded available quantity; derivation preserves parent linkage; and correction adds qualification without erasing the prior assertion."},{"archetype_element":"Hidden representation","domain_realization":"Tables, documents, event streams, vendor status encodings, indexes, internal identifiers, caches, and storage order are non-contractual."},{"archetype_element":"Conformance oracle","domain_realization":"One parameterized suite observes only contract operations and compares abstract states, histories, errors, and authorized side effects across implementations."},{"archetype_element":"Substitutability rule","domain_realization":"A candidate implementation may replace the incumbent for this component only if it satisfies every mandatory contract check and exposes no disallowed representation-dependent behavior in the bounded trial."},{"archetype_element":"Stewardship and evolution","domain_realization":"A laboratory quality owner controls contract versions; changing an invariant, transition meaning, authorized view, or error category requires explicit review and migration treatment, while conforming internal changes do not."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"abstract_data_type_specification","role":"Defines the evidence record’s abstract values and operations, then maps each permitted concrete implementation to that meaning through a representation invariant and abstraction function.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, the intervention would reduce to a shared list of fields or operations and could not determine whether different storage states denote the same continuity history."},{"mechanism_slug":"design_by_contract_clause","role":"Assigns checkable preconditions, postconditions, unchanged-state guarantees, authorization failures, and error categories to each evidence-handling operation.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, edge cases such as duplicate acceptance, over-consumption, or correction of an unknown assertion would remain implementation-defined and substitutions could diverge."},{"mechanism_slug":"opaque_type_or_module_boundary","role":"Exposes an evidence-record handle and sanctioned operations while preventing clients from reading or rewriting internal rows, status codes, or storage order.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, clients could continue depending on or modifying representation details, recreating the coupling that the contract is meant to remove."},{"mechanism_slug":"black_box_contract_test_suite","role":"Runs the same contract-derived examples against every implementation and gates substitutability on public behavior rather than internal similarity.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, conformance would rely on document review or vendor assertion, leaving no common executable acceptance rule."},{"mechanism_slug":"property_based_conformance_test","role":"Generates valid and invalid operation sequences to test invariant preservation, unchanged state after rejected operations, custody uniqueness, quantity bounds, and parent-child integrity.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, the oracle would cover only anticipated examples and could miss sequence-dependent violations that arise through unusual combinations of otherwise valid actions."},{"mechanism_slug":"representation_leakage_probe","role":"Checks outputs for undocumented dependence on row order, vendor codes, internal keys, mutable timestamps, error wording, and other observable but non-contractual details.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, an implementation could pass promised-behavior tests while still exposing accidental features that clients would convert into a new implicit interface."},{"mechanism_slug":"semantic_versioning_and_deprecation_gate","role":"Classifies later changes to operations, invariants, error categories, and authorized views and requires an explicit migration path for breaking contract changes.","counterfactual_removal":"Without it, the behavioral surface could change after adoption without a reliable signal to record producers and reviewers."}],"causal_chain":["Evidence-tracking implementations currently lack a shared abstract definition of what their concrete records must mean.","Clients therefore use observable representation details as proxies for custody, seal, sampling, consumption, and correction semantics.","Those dependencies allow migrations or alternative implementations to produce different apparent histories from the same handling actions.","The intervention specifies operations, state transitions, invariants, errors, authorization-sensitive views, and side-effect limits independently of storage.","Opaque access prevents new direct dependencies, while the abstraction mapping relates each valid concrete state to the specified evidence state.","A shared black-box and property-based oracle rejects implementations whose public behavior violates that state model, and leakage probes identify undocumented observable dependencies.","Implementations that satisfy the bounded acceptance rule can change representation while preserving the contractually defined evidence-continuity meaning."],"baseline":"The comparison baseline is the organization’s existing implementation-specific workflow: downstream integrations read vendor fields or exports, migration acceptance checks field presence and selected example records, and disagreements are reconciled manually. The first study would document this comparator rather than assume how often divergence occurs.","nearest_rivals":["A universal evidence-exchange schema standardizes field shapes across systems but does not by itself define operation sequences, invariants, error behavior, or when two differently stored histories have the same meaning.","Mandating one centralized evidence-management implementation avoids near-term substitution but retains dependence on that implementation and does not supply an acceptance rule for later migration.","A procedural custody checklist governs human handling steps but does not define the behavioral obligations of the record component or detect representation-dependent software behavior.","A hash-chained or append-only ledger can make recorded changes detectable but does not decide whether transfers, corrections, sampling, quantity accounting, or authorized views have the required semantics.","Manual record-by-record migration review can inspect selected cases but does not provide a reusable black-box contract for every implementation and operation sequence."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal’s distinctive claim is limited to architecture: treating the evidence continuity record as an opaque abstract state machine with explicit behavioral laws and a shared conformance oracle addresses semantic substitutability across representations. It is not merely a common data format, an integrity ledger, a custody procedure, or a software procurement choice.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The laboratory or evidence-unit quality authority may approve the abstract contract and an offline conformance evaluation. Case-specific evidentiary interpretations, disclosure decisions, admissibility arguments, and findings of wrongdoing remain with the legally authorized human roles.","authorized_first_step":"Create a synthetic, non-case dataset and two sandbox implementations—a simple transparent model and an adapter that mimics the incumbent public behavior—then run a predeclared contract suite without changing any production record or workflow.","excluded_actions":["No alteration, deletion, migration, or relabeling of live evidence records","No change to physical custody, seal status, or evidence disposition","No automated conclusion that custody was legally sufficient or that evidence is admissible","No exposure of restricted case information to unauthorized testers or systems","No production cutover based only on a passing sandbox suite","No retroactive rewriting of historical assertions to make them conform"],"halt_rollback":"Stop the evaluation if the contract permits silent history loss, collapses distinct legally relevant states, exposes unauthorized information, or cannot represent an incumbent handling sequence selected for the bounded test. Preserve the incumbent system unchanged, discard only synthetic sandbox state, and return the disputed clause for quality and legal review."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Independent reviewers may find that legally or scientifically relevant meaning necessarily depends on representation-specific artifacts—such as original document form, qualified signatures, instrument-native metadata, or jurisdiction-specific audit details—that the proposed abstract state omits. In that case, behavioral equivalence at this interface would not establish an acceptable substitute for the complete record.","problem_falsifier":"A bounded inventory falsifies the proposed problem if all authorized clients already depend only on an explicit behavioral contract, no client reads undocumented representation details, and independently implemented adapters produce identical abstract states and error behavior for every sampled handling sequence.","intervention_falsifier":"The intervention is falsified for the tested scope if an implementation passes the predeclared conformance and leakage checks yet independent reviewers, using only information the contract classifies as observable, identify a material difference in custody, seal, derivation, consumption, correction, or authorization meaning.","risks":["The abstract model may omit a jurisdictional, scientific, or laboratory-specific distinction and falsely equate unlike histories.","Tests may encode incumbent quirks and freeze them as contractual behavior.","A green suite may be mistaken for validation of factual event accuracy, although it tests record behavior rather than whether people entered true information.","Opacity may impede legitimate audit or disclosure unless sanctioned export and introspection operations are complete.","Generated tests may under-sample long, concurrent, or malformed sequences.","Stable public identifiers or exports could expose sensitive case relationships if authorization rules are underspecified.","Version governance may become ceremonial and allow behavioral changes to be mislabeled as compatible."]},"next_evidence_step":"In one sandbox session, quality staff and one authorized downstream reviewer should specify 12–20 synthetic handling scenarios covering registration, matched and unmatched transfer, seal transitions, sample derivation, partial and excessive consumption, correction, repeated calls, unauthorized queries, and export. Before running either implementation, they should record the expected abstract post-state, permitted error category, unchanged-state obligations, and allowed observables for each scenario. Run the identical suite against the transparent model and incumbent-behavior adapter, then retain every divergence as evidence about an implementation defect, a contract omission, or an over-specified test. This step estimates only whether a coherent and discriminating contract can be written for the bounded scenarios; it does not estimate operational effect or authorize deployment.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Not assessed because this sealed instruction places exactly one proposal in scope and permits no comparison with other experiment candidates.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Initial complete proposal","Concrete domain problem inference","Causal preservation of the representation-independent interface archetype","Explicit authority and safeguards","Falsifiable bounded evidence plan"],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}