{"schema_version":1,"research_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_external_evaluation_20260803","source_assessment_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__environmental_climate:P4:v0","cell_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__environmental_climate","search_queries":["site:drought.gov drought planning triggers indicators stages drought response plan","site:epa.gov water utility drought response plan triggers stages official","drought management plan indicators triggers stages implementation spreadsheet decision support system research","drought early warning systems interoperability standards API climate services conformance","drought stage decision support software triggers water utility dashboard drought response stage recommendation","\"drought stage\" \"dashboard\" trigger water utility","\"drought contingency plan\" software dashboard triggers stages","site:gov drought stage determination methodology indicators triggers dashboard","U.S. Drought Monitor methodology operational process convergence evidence quality assurance version archive official","site:droughtmonitor.unl.edu AboutUSDM methodology data weekly map authors process","OGC WaterML 2.0 standard observations time series official","OGC API Environmental Data Retrieval standard official conformance","site:droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/USDM methodology authors weekly process data inputs","site:droughtmonitor.unl.edu \"The Drought Monitor process\"","site:drought.gov \"U.S. Drought Monitor\" methodology authors convergence evidence","United States Drought Monitor operational process paper Svoboda LeComte 2015 methodology"],"sources":[{"source_id":"S1","title":"Monitoring Drought","publisher":"NOAA National Integrated Drought Information System (Drought.gov)","url":"https://www.drought.gov/what-is-drought/monitoring-drought","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Drought onset and termination are difficult to identify and vary by region.","Drought assessments combine precipitation, temperature, streamflow, groundwater, reservoir, soil-moisture, snowpack, and other indicators.","Single, multiple, and composite-indicator approaches are established monitoring practices.","Drought early warning information can trigger actions intended to reduce damage."]},{"source_id":"S2","title":"Drought Response and Recovery: A Basic Guide for Water Utilities","publisher":"U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Water","url":"https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPURL.cgi?Dockey=P100T4ID.TXT","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"2017-10","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["EPA advises utilities to establish drought stages, identifiable triggers, reduction goals, restrictions, and enforcement provisions.","EPA identifies utility operators, managers, legal counsel, governing boards, and other decision-makers as drought-response actors.","The guide documents operational, economic, social, and environmental consequences of drought and gives examples of utilities using staged plans.","EPA warns that response actions may be regulated or prohibited by state law and should be checked with regulators or legal counsel."]},{"source_id":"S3","title":"Building a Drought Planning Platform","publisher":"NOAA National Integrated Drought Information System (Drought.gov)","url":"https://www.drought.gov/drought-research/building-drought-planning-platform","source_class":"OFFICIAL_ORGANIZATION_DATA","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["NOAA/NIDIS and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are developing a drought-planning platform initially focused on Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah.","The platform is based on documented needs of drought and water planners and is intended to support indicator, index, stage, trigger, implementation, and plan-update decisions.","The project identifies federal program owners, funders, prospective users, and a planned user-feedback process.","The expressed need concerns drought-planning support, not specifically a representation-independent recommender contract."]},{"source_id":"S4","title":"Drought Indicators & Assessment","publisher":"Virginia Department of Environmental Quality","url":"https://www.deq.virginia.gov/water/water-quantity/drought/drought-indicators-assessment","source_class":"GOVERNMENT_OR_REGULATOR","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Virginia DEQ operates a concrete multi-indicator drought-assessment workflow across thirteen evaluation regions.","Each monitored indicator has thresholds relevant to drought-stage determination, but DEQ and the Drought Management Task Force weigh the indicators with other indexes and regional reports.","An indicator stage is explicitly distinguished from a declared drought, supporting separation between computational advice and authorized declaration.","Virginia DEQ and the Drought Management Task Force are identifiable possible adopters or reviewers of a non-authoritative recommendation component."]},{"source_id":"S5","title":"Water company drought plan guideline, 2025","publisher":"Environment Agency and UK Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs","url":"https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/water-company-drought-plan-guideline-2025/water-company-drought-plan-guideline-2025","source_class":"OFFICIAL_GUIDANCE","publication_date":"2025-06-16","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["Regulated water companies must document drought triggers and explain interactions among multiple sources and triggers.","The guidance covers onset, implementation, cessation, recovery, geographic applicability, lead times, trigger testing, plan review, and material revisions.","Plans are subject to statutory consultation, security review, regulator review, and authorization before publication.","This is close prior practice for explicit trigger semantics and governance, although it does not prescribe a software-level substitutability contract or reusable behavioral oracle."]},{"source_id":"S6","title":"What is the USDM?","publisher":"National Drought Mitigation Center, University of Nebraska–Lincoln","url":"https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/About/WhatistheUSDM.aspx","source_class":"OFFICIAL_ORGANIZATION_DATA","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["The operational U.S. Drought Monitor uses defined categories and a convergence-of-evidence process combining physical indicators, impacts, observations, and expert feedback.","The USDM is not a purely statistical model; authors reconcile conflicting evidence and apply place- and season-specific judgment.","The established process limits typical weekly intensification and treats finalized weekly maps as non-retroactively revised.","This is an operational analogue for categorized, history-sensitive drought assessment, but not an interchangeable software-component contract."]},{"source_id":"S7","title":"WaterML","publisher":"Open Geospatial Consortium","url":"https://www.ogc.org/standards/waterml/","source_class":"STANDARD","publication_date":"n.d.","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["WaterML 2.0 is an established information model for representation and cross-system exchange of water-observation data.","WaterML is based on OGC Observations and Measurements/ISO 19156 and supplies official schemas.","WaterML can standardize evidence representation but does not define drought-stage transitions, missing-evidence policy, recommendation authority, or behavioral equivalence among recommenders."]},{"source_id":"S8","title":"OGC API - Environmental Data Retrieval 1.0 Conformance Test Suite","publisher":"Open Geospatial Consortium","url":"https://cite.ogc.org/teamengine/about/ogcapi-edr10/1.0/site/","source_class":"STANDARD","publication_date":"2022-12-16","accessed_at":"2026-08-03","claims_supported":["OGC maintains an executable conformance suite for environmental-data APIs.","The suite describes conformance testing as black-box examination of externally visible behavior independent of implementation details.","The suite demonstrates technical feasibility of machine-readable interfaces and reusable conformance classes in the environmental-data domain.","Its tests concern data discovery, encodings, collections, and queries rather than stateful drought-stage policy semantics."]}],"problem_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"The sources strongly establish that drought assessment matters, combines heterogeneous evidence, uses stages and triggers, and can lead to consequential actions. They also show complex operational workflows in which computation must remain distinct from declaration authority. However, no searched source directly documents the proposal's specific failure mode: drought programs depending on spreadsheet cells, dashboard colors, vendor fields, rounding, or evaluation order and then changing recommendations during implementation replacement. That representation-coupling problem is plausible but remains an inference requiring a workflow audit.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4","S5","S6"]},"stakeholder_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"NOAA/NIDIS and the Bureau of Reclamation are funding a drought-planning platform explicitly based on documented planner needs, EPA identifies water utilities and governing bodies as responsible actors, and Virginia DEQ/DMTF operates a matching assessment-and-recommendation workflow. These are credible adopters, authorizers, or funders. None expresses demand for the exact stateful interface contract and cross-implementation conformance oracle, so pull for this incremental intervention is not verified.","source_ids":["S2","S3","S4","S5"]},"prior_art":{"proximity":"ADJACENT_PRIOR_ART","closest_analogues":[{"name":"Regulated drought plans with explicit, tested triggers and revision governance","similarity":"The 2025 Environment Agency guideline specifies interacting triggers, stages, onset and recovery behavior, testing, review, consultation, and authorized material changes.","remaining_difference":"It governs the plan and its triggers, not an opaque stateful recommender with stable errors, receipts, versioned semantics, and one implementation-independent acceptance suite.","source_ids":["S5"]},{"name":"Virginia DEQ multi-indicator drought-stage assessment","similarity":"A live government workflow combines thresholded hydrologic indicators and regional evidence to recommend, but not itself declare, drought status.","remaining_difference":"The public description does not expose a versioned software contract, independent reference implementation, immutable assessment receipt, or substitutability test.","source_ids":["S4"]},{"name":"U.S. Drought Monitor convergence-of-evidence process","similarity":"An established operational process produces categorized drought assessments from heterogeneous evidence, expert reconciliation, prior state, and bounded update behavior.","remaining_difference":"It is a human-authored national monitoring product rather than a locally approved deterministic policy component intended for interchangeable implementations.","source_ids":["S6"]},{"name":"WaterML 2.0 plus OGC environmental API conformance testing","similarity":"These standards provide representation-neutral environmental observations, machine-readable interfaces, and reusable black-box conformance testing.","remaining_difference":"They standardize evidence exchange and retrieval behavior, not drought-stage hysteresis, insufficiency, corrections, stable reasons, receipts, or decision-authority boundaries.","source_ids":["S7","S8"]},{"name":"NOAA/NIDIS Drought Planning Platform","similarity":"The developing platform supports selection and maintenance of indicators, stages, triggers, and drought plans for identified planner users.","remaining_difference":"The published scope is planning guidance and decision support; it does not describe a multi-implementation behavioral contract for an approved drought-stage state machine.","source_ids":["S3"]}],"distinctive_claim_remaining":"For one fixed, approved policy and parameter version, encoding the drought-stage calculation as a stateful behavioral contract—covering insufficiency, temporal order, hysteresis, corrections, invalidation, stable errors/reasons, and receipts—and admitting implementations only through one black-box oracle will allow an independently built engine to replace the incumbent without decision-relevant output divergence or client dependence on internal representation. This is falsified if implementations that pass the preregistered suite disagree on any contracted output for an in-scope history, or if clients still require implementation-specific fields or behavior to consume the replacement.","confidence":"MODERATE"},"implementation_evidence":{"support":"MODERATE","rationale":"Typed hydrologic observations, machine-readable environmental APIs, and implementation-independent black-box conformance suites are established and make the core engineering credible. Official drought guidance supplies candidate stage, trigger, temporal, recovery, and governance semantics. Feasibility is nevertheless policy-specific: extracting tacit spreadsheet behavior, resolving ambiguity without changing policy, obtaining source-data rights, validating corrections and hysteresis, integrating downstream clients, satisfying public-records/accessibility/security obligations, and preserving declaration authority have not been tested. A shadow-only prototype is technically safe if it cannot notify, control, restrict, allocate, or declare.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S7","S8"]},"scores":{"meaningful_impact":{"score":4,"rationale":"An unintended escalation, de-escalation, or indeterminate result can affect planning, communications, and potentially restrictions; drought itself has significant operational and societal consequences. Realized impact reduction is unmeasured.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4"]},"stakeholder_pull":{"score":3,"rationale":"Credible programs and operational users need better drought-planning and stage-assessment support, but none has requested this exact contract-and-oracle intervention.","source_ids":["S2","S3","S4"]},"incremental_advantage":{"score":3,"rationale":"The proposal adds stateful behavioral equivalence and implementation substitution beyond trigger documents, input standards, and data-API tests. Whether that produces lower migration risk or effort than careful manual validation is untested.","source_ids":["S5","S7","S8"]},"distinctiveness_plausibility":{"score":3,"rationale":"The searched analogues separately cover trigger governance, operational classification, typed water data, and black-box conformance. Their combination leaves a plausible contrast, but world novelty and unsearched organizational implementations remain unknown.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S6","S7","S8"]},"technical_implementability":{"score":4,"rationale":"Adapters, typed schemas, independent decision tables, generated sequences, receipts, and black-box tests use mature techniques with environmental-domain precedent. The difficult work is semantic extraction and oracle completeness rather than basic software capability.","source_ids":["S5","S7","S8"]},"adoption_authority_feasibility":{"score":4,"rationale":"A program lead can plausibly authorize a non-live sandbox while existing regulators, policy owners, boards, or designated task forces retain policy and declaration authority. Exact local approvals must be confirmed.","source_ids":["S2","S4","S5"]},"evidence_readiness":{"score":2,"rationale":"The domain need and adjacent methods are documented, but there is no dependency inventory, discrepant replacement case, independently implemented prototype, preregistered trial, or measured workflow outcome for the proposed intervention.","source_ids":["S1","S3","S4","S8"]},"safety_net_benefit":{"score":4,"rationale":"Non-authoritative shadow execution, immutable receipts, state-preserving errors, preregistered comparison, halt conditions, and retained human authority provide a strong reversible safety net. Incorrect software outputs remain consequential if labels or isolation fail.","source_ids":["S2","S4","S5"]},"scalability":{"score":3,"rationale":"The reusable interface and test architecture could transfer across programs, while every jurisdiction's indicators, thresholds, discretion, data rights, and authority structure require separate policy mapping and validation.","source_ids":["S1","S4","S5","S7","S8"]}},"score_confidence":"MODERATE","costs":{"first_evidence":{"band_2026_usd":"10K_TO_50K","scope":"A four-to-eight-week, non-live audit of one approved policy version and one completed assessment packet; dependency inventory; draft abstract state and operations; preregistered ordinary, boundary, missingness, and sequence cases; no production integration.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Approximately 0.2-0.4 FTE each from a hydrologist/policy owner, drought analyst, and software engineer.","Existing policy documents and one authorized packet are available and require no major data procurement.","The estimate is resource-equivalent, not a vendor quotation, and excludes policy revision and legal proceedings."],"source_ids":["S4","S5"]},"initial_deployment_startup":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Build an incumbent adapter, independent decision-table reference, typed interface, receipt format, automated conformance suite, generated sequence tests, leakage audit, and controlled shadow runner for one workflow.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["One incumbent implementation and a small number of downstream consumers are in scope.","Existing identity, test, and deployment infrastructure can be reused.","No automatic declaration, restriction, allocation, public notification, or new scientific model is included."],"source_ids":["S7","S8"]},"operational_launch":{"band_2026_usd":"250K_TO_1M","scope":"Policy-owner validation, security/privacy/accessibility review, production data connectors, historical replay, shadow operation through an assessment cycle, discrepancy adjudication, client migration, training, monitoring, rollback, and governance documentation.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Launch is limited to one program or watershed and one approved policy family.","A human-authorized workflow remains the system of record during shadowing and staged adoption.","Material policy ambiguity, licensing disputes, or procurement delay could move the cost above this range."],"source_ids":["S2","S4","S5","S7","S8"]},"annual_recurring":{"band_2026_usd":"50K_TO_250K","scope":"Contract stewardship, policy/version records, test-corpus maintenance, data-connector updates, security patches, annual audit, incident response, and support for one operational program.","confidence":"LOW","assumptions":["Approximately 0.5-1.5 combined FTE plus routine hosting and assurance costs.","Major policy redesigns, new jurisdictions, and new indicator science are separate projects.","The conformance suite is automated and integrated into normal release controls."],"source_ids":["S5","S8"]}},"verified_pipeline_gates":{"externally_supported_problem":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"External evidence verifies consequential, multi-indicator drought-stage workflows, but not the asserted prevalence or occurrence of representation-dependent recommendation changes in a selected workflow.","source_ids":["S1","S2","S4","S5","S6"]},"externally_credible_adopter_or_authorizer":{"status":"YES","reason":"NOAA/NIDIS and Reclamation are identifiable funders of planner-facing drought tooling; Virginia DEQ/DMTF and regulated water companies are credible workflow owners; boards, regulators, ministers, and designated task forces retain authorization roles.","source_ids":["S2","S3","S4","S5"]},"distinct_testable_incremental_claim":{"status":"YES","reason":"The same-policy-version substitution claim is contrastive against trigger plans, input standards, and data conformance suites and can be tested through preregistered cross-implementation histories and client-dependency checks.","source_ids":["S5","S7","S8"]},"bounded_next_evidence_step":{"status":"YES","reason":"One policy version, one completed packet, two independent implementations, a frozen synthetic corpus, explicit comparators, discrepancy classes, and decision-relevant falsifiers bound the proposed sandbox study.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S8"]},"no_unresolved_safety_or_authority_stop":{"status":"YES","reason":"A non-authoritative, isolated shadow study can preserve existing declaration and policy authority, provided outputs cannot trigger restrictions, allocation, notifications, or operational controls and local approvals are confirmed before using protected data.","source_ids":["S2","S4","S5"]},"credible_cost_scope_and_range":{"status":"UNCERTAIN","reason":"The work packages and broad resource-equivalent bands are scoped, but none of the eight sources provides comparable implementation-cost data; staffing, integration, assurance, and procurement assumptions require partner validation.","source_ids":["S4","S5","S7","S8"]}},"next_evidence_step":"Partner with one drought-program owner, preferably an operational assessment body such as Virginia DEQ/DMTF or a consenting utility, for a six-to-eight-week non-live study. Freeze one approved policy version and one completed assessment packet. Before implementation, register the abstract evidence quantities, units, freshness and coverage rules, stage set, missingness behavior, temporal transitions, hysteresis/persistence, invalidation, stable errors/reasons, receipt fields, expected boundary outcomes, and tolerances. Compare (A) the incumbent workflow through an adapter, (B) an independently coded decision-table reference, and (C) the current manual or schema-only validation baseline on the frozen packet and synthetic histories covering exact thresholds, equivalent units, reordered fields, missing/stale evidence, repeated snapshots, escalation and recovery persistence, corrections, and invalidation. Measure contracted-output disagreement, undocumented dependencies discovered, client changes required, adjudication time, and false acceptance against deliberately mutated implementations. Falsify the problem if the inventory finds no representation dependency and the independent implementation substitutes without client change or output divergence. Falsify the intervention if a deliberately nonconforming implementation survives the suite, if two passing implementations disagree on an in-scope contracted result, or if the policy cannot be expressed without exposing incumbent representation. Keep all outputs labeled non-authoritative and disconnected from declarations, restrictions, allocations, and public communications.","blocking_evidence":["No direct evidence shows that a real drought-stage workflow currently depends on spreadsheet layout, colors, vendor scales, undocumented rounding, evaluation order, or other representation details.","No independent implementation has been tested against the same approved policy and assessment histories.","No selected authority has approved the interpretation of insufficiency, correction, invalidation, hysteresis, reason, or receipt semantics.","No measured comparison establishes fewer decision-relevant discrepancies, lower migration effort, or better auditability than manual validation or an input-schema-only baseline.","Local data rights, confidentiality, public-records, cybersecurity, accessibility, procurement, and declaration-authority requirements remain unverified.","The resource-equivalent cost bands lack external comparable-cost evidence."],"research_disposition":"PARTNERED_RESEARCH_PROGRAM","world_novelty_boundary":"The search found established drought-stage and trigger governance, operational multi-indicator classifications, interoperable water-observation standards, and black-box environmental API conformance testing. It did not establish whether the proposed combination is novel worldwide. World novelty, patentability, freedom to operate, market size, and realized impact were not measured; undisclosed, proprietary, local, or unindexed implementations may substantially narrow the remaining distinction.","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_version":0,"controller_recommendation":{"action":"STOP_EMPIRICAL_RESEARCH_NEEDED","repairable":false,"material_progress_observed":true,"progress_targets":["Obtain written participation and sandbox authority from one drought-program owner and confirm who may interpret policy versus declare stages.","Complete a dependency inventory that directly tests for spreadsheet, dashboard, provider-field, rounding, ordering, missing-value, and display coupling.","Freeze and approve one policy-version semantic specification before viewing candidate implementation results.","Build genuinely independent incumbent-adapter and decision-table implementations and preregister the comparison corpus and thresholds.","Demonstrate that mutation tests are rejected and that passing implementations agree on all contracted outputs across boundary and sequential histories.","Measure client-change effort, discrepancy-adjudication time, reproducibility, and auditability against manual or schema-only validation.","Validate local legal, data-rights, security, accessibility, records, and procurement constraints and confirm shadow isolation.","Replace assumption-based cost bands with partner-validated staffing, integration, assurance, and recurring-maintenance estimates."],"reason":"Web evidence verifies the importance and operational structure of drought-stage assessment and identifies plausible adopters, adjacent standards, and a bounded safe study. It does not verify the candidate's specific representation-coupling problem or the intervention's substitution advantage. Those questions require access to an actual workflow, policy artifacts, implementations, users, and controlled tests rather than further bounded public-web research."},"proposal_index":4}