{"schema_version":1,"experiment_id":"eoa_inverse_innovation_exp06_four_proposal_generalization60_20260803","cell_id":"representation_independent_interface_contract__futurism_foresight","arm":"COMPLETE_PROPOSAL_PORTFOLIO","candidate_id":"adaptive_policy_signpost_contract","proposal_index":3,"version":0,"title":"Behavioral Contract for Adaptive-Policy Signposts and Alerts","problem":"A coastal city uses long-range heat and flood signposts to determine when an adaptation pathway should receive formal review. The signposts and their histories are represented in policy memoranda, analyst spreadsheets, monitoring dashboards, and data-provider pipelines. Each representation handles observation time, revisions, missing values, threshold duration, unit conversion, acknowledgment, and retirement differently. When a dashboard or data source changes, the city cannot determine whether the new implementation preserves the governed signpost behavior or silently changes when a review alert appears.","actors":["City resilience monitoring lead","Climate and infrastructure analysts who maintain signposts","Departments responsible for adaptation pathways","Data stewards and external observation providers","Software maintainers responsible for monitoring implementations","Officials authorized to initiate reviews or change policy"],"observable_state":"For an identical sequence of dated observations, two implementations can disagree about whether a signpost is observing, indeterminate, breached, alerting, acknowledged, suspended, or retired. Disagreements arise from behaviors such as treating missing values as zero, evaluating arrival order instead of observation time, revising a value without replaying the evaluation window, or interpreting a threshold as one observation rather than a sustained condition. Matching indicator names and displayed thresholds does not establish behavioral equivalence.","consequence":"A representation change can advance, delay, suppress, or repeat a policy-review alert without an authorized change to the adaptation pathway. Officials may then act on altered trigger semantics while believing they are following the same anticipatory commitment.","affected_objective":"Keep adaptive-policy review commitments interpretable and auditable as monitoring data sources and technical implementations change, while preserving human authority over actual policy action.","intervention":"Define an abstract component called an Adaptive Signpost Register. Its operations register a versioned signpost specification, ingest a provenance-bearing observation, mark an interval missing, revise or retract an observation, evaluate status at an observation time, emit a review alert, acknowledge an alert, suspend or resume evaluation, supersede a signpost, and replay its history. The public contract specifies units, temporal scope, evaluation windows, threshold and persistence semantics, missingness behavior, revision handling, typed errors, allowed side effects, and the state transitions among unarmed, observing, indeterminate, breached, alerting, acknowledged, suspended, and retired. Its invariants require an immutable event history, one active specification version per signpost, explicit provenance for every accepted observation, deterministic replay at the contract level, and separation of an advisory alert from authorization to act. Dashboard tables, database schemas, windowing algorithms, cache layouts, provider payloads, and visualization choices remain hidden. A replacement implementation is accepted only after the same event histories produce conforming public states and alerts under a shared black-box oracle.","structural_mapping":[{"archetype_element":"Abstract behavioral surface","domain_realization":"Operations for signpost registration, observation ingestion, missingness, revision, retraction, evaluation, alerting, acknowledgment, suspension, supersession, and deterministic replay."},{"archetype_element":"Abstract state model","domain_realization":"Versioned signpost specifications, provenance-bearing observation histories, evaluation time, alert history, and lifecycle states from unarmed through retired."},{"archetype_element":"Behavioral laws and invariants","domain_realization":"One active specification version, immutable event history, explicit observation provenance, declared missingness semantics, replay equivalence, idempotent duplicate handling, and advisory alerts that cannot themselves authorize policy action."},{"archetype_element":"Hidden representation","domain_realization":"Dashboard widgets, spreadsheet formulas, database tables, provider payloads, caches, indexes, evaluation algorithms, and visualization ordering."},{"archetype_element":"Error and side-effect semantics","domain_realization":"Invalid units, unauthorized revisions, malformed times, and observations outside scope return typed errors without changing signpost state; evaluation reads do not emit duplicate alerts; accepted revisions append events rather than rewriting history."},{"archetype_element":"Conformance oracle","domain_realization":"One parameterized suite replays valid and invalid event streams against every implementation and observes only contract-defined states, alerts, errors, and audit records."},{"archetype_element":"Substitutability rule","domain_realization":"A dashboard, spreadsheet engine, or monitoring service may replace another only when it conforms for all governed signpost versions and predeclared resource limits."},{"archetype_element":"Leakage control","domain_realization":"Audits identify dependencies on dashboard colors, row order, provider-specific codes, polling schedules, timestamps of processing, or undocumented rounding and either seal them or make them explicit contract terms."}],"mechanism_mapping":[{"mechanism_slug":"abstract_data_type_specification","role":"Defines the signpost register by abstract specifications, event histories, statuses, and alerts, then maps each valid dashboard, spreadsheet, or service state to that meaning through an invariant and abstraction function.","counterfactual_removal":"Without the abstract state and semantic mapping, implementations can display identical thresholds while assigning different meanings to revisions, missing periods, evaluation windows, and alerts."},{"mechanism_slug":"design_by_contract_clause","role":"States preconditions, postconditions, and violation policies for ingestion, revision, evaluation, acknowledgment, suspension, and supersession.","counterfactual_removal":"Without operation-level obligations, invalid units, late revisions, duplicate observations, and post-retirement events remain subject to local implementation choices."},{"mechanism_slug":"interface_definition_language","role":"Defines a representation-neutral machine-readable boundary for signpost handles, specifications, observations, status queries, alerts, errors, and audit events while excluding provider and storage fields.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a compiled boundary, clients may integrate directly with dashboard tables or provider payloads and make those representations an unofficial interface."},{"mechanism_slug":"opaque_type_or_module_boundary","role":"Makes signpost histories and implementation state accessible only through governed operations, with a deliberate audit export as the sole introspection window.","counterfactual_removal":"Without opacity, analysts can edit spreadsheet cells or database records directly, bypassing revision semantics, provenance checks, and immutable history."},{"mechanism_slug":"black_box_contract_test_suite","role":"Replays the same event streams against every implementation and gates substitution on matching contract-level states, alerts, errors, and audit behavior.","counterfactual_removal":"Without a reusable black-box gate, replacement approval relies on matching screens or a few example dates rather than stateful behavioral equivalence."},{"mechanism_slug":"property_based_conformance_test","role":"Generates histories containing missing intervals, duplicates, unit conversions, out-of-order arrivals, revisions, acknowledgments, suspensions, and version changes to test invariants across operation sequences.","counterfactual_removal":"Without generated histories, rare event orderings can violate replay or alert invariants while ordinary examples continue to pass."},{"mechanism_slug":"representation_leakage_probe","role":"Tests whether polling cadence, dashboard color, rounding, provider codes, row order, processing timestamps, or error text disclose implementation details that clients could treat as trigger meaning.","counterfactual_removal":"Without leakage probing, clients may remain coupled to unpromised observables even when direct access to internal state is blocked."},{"mechanism_slug":"semantic_versioning_and_deprecation_gate","role":"Classifies changes to thresholds, temporal semantics, missingness, revisions, alerts, and audit behavior and preserves the interpretation of histories evaluated under earlier versions.","counterfactual_removal":"Without behavioral versioning, a configuration or software update can reinterpret an existing observation history without an explicit policy change."}],"causal_chain":["The city expresses each adaptive signpost as a versioned stateful contract rather than as a dashboard formula, spreadsheet cell, or prose threshold.","Observation providers and monitoring tools map their internal records to the same abstract operations, temporal semantics, states, and invariants.","Opaque access and append-only revision rules prevent direct edits from bypassing provenance and replay behavior.","Shared black-box and generated-sequence tests expose implementations that handle missingness, time, revisions, persistence, or alerting differently.","Versioning distinguishes an authorized change in signpost meaning from a private implementation replacement.","Officials receive alerts whose procedural meaning is preserved across conforming implementations, while the separate decision process retains authority over whether and how to respond."],"baseline":"The resilience team records signpost definitions in policy documents, reproduces them as spreadsheet formulas or dashboard rules, and manually compares selected outputs after a data-provider or software change. The review may check indicator names, units, and displayed thresholds but lacks a shared lifecycle model, replay law, revision policy, and implementation-independent substitution gate.","nearest_rivals":["A common observation schema standardizes timestamps, units, and field names but does not define lifecycle states, missingness, revision replay, alert persistence, or acknowledgment behavior.","A monitoring playbook tells analysts when to inspect indicators and notify officials but does not make dashboard and pipeline implementations behaviorally substitutable.","A single mandated dashboard avoids immediate variation by fixing one implementation, but it provides no representation-independent criterion for replacing that implementation later.","A policy memorandum containing threshold prose records institutional intent but cannot mechanically enforce error semantics, temporal windows, state transitions, or side-effect limits.","Manual parallel monitoring can compare selected alerts during migration but may not exercise rare event sequences or distinguish accidental agreement from contractual equivalence."],"remaining_contrastive_claim":"The proposal's limited contrastive claim is that an adaptive signpost should be governed as a stateful behavioral object whose event handling and alert semantics survive changes of representation. It is not merely an indicator schema, shared dashboard, data-quality program, forecasting model, or automated policy-decision system.","authority_safety":{"decision_authority":"The resilience monitoring lead may draft the signpost contract and conduct an offline substitution assessment. The relevant policy owner retains authority to define thresholds and initiate reviews; elected or delegated officials retain authority over spending, regulation, public warnings, and adaptation actions.","authorized_first_step":"Using synthetic observations and copies of two non-live signpost specifications, the monitoring lead may implement a simple event-ledger model and a spreadsheet adapter, predeclare expected behavioral laws, and replay test histories offline.","excluded_actions":["Issuing live public or internal operational alerts","Changing an approved threshold, evaluation window, or adaptation pathway","Connecting the pilot to production sensors, dashboards, or notification channels","Automatically initiating procurement, expenditure, emergency measures, or regulatory action","Treating contract conformance as proof that an indicator is scientifically valid or policy-relevant","Rewriting authoritative observation histories","Using undocumented provider fields as contract terms without data-owner and policy-owner review"],"halt_rollback":"Stop if the contract cannot distinguish missing from non-breaching data, replays produce non-deterministic public states, an adapter requires alteration of authoritative records, or a test alert can reach an operational channel. Roll back by disabling the offline adapters and retaining the existing policy records and monitoring process unchanged."},"negative_tests":{"strongest_counterevidence":"Decision-relevant signpost interpretation may depend on contextual analyst judgment, data-quality assessment, and interaction among indicators that cannot be captured in a stable component contract without either weakening the signpost or converting contested policy judgments into hidden technical rules.","problem_falsifier":"For predeclared histories containing missing intervals, revisions, late arrivals, suspensions, and sustained threshold conditions, existing implementations already produce identical states, alerts, and audit interpretations without relying on undocumented representation details.","intervention_falsifier":"Two independent implementations pass the full conformance suite but produce different alert or lifecycle states for a predeclared decision-relevant history, or an approved signpost cannot be expressed without exposing provider-specific or storage-specific fields.","risks":["Formalizing a signpost may create false confidence in the underlying indicator or threshold.","The contract may encode contested temporal or missingness judgments as technical invariants.","Weak generators may omit consequential event histories.","Over-specified tests may freeze harmless implementation choices such as rounding or notification presentation.","Opaque implementation state may obstruct scientific or governance audit unless the sanctioned audit view is sufficient.","A technically conforming replacement may have unacceptable latency or resource behavior not covered by the first offline test.","Officials may mistake an advisory contract state for authorization or an evidentiary conclusion."]},"next_evidence_step":"Predeclare a finite test matrix for two synthetic signposts covering unit conversion, duplicate observations, missing intervals, out-of-order arrival, corrected values, retractions, threshold persistence, acknowledgment, suspension, supersession, and deterministic replay. Drive an independently written event-ledger model and spreadsheet adapter with identical histories, compare only contract-defined states, alerts, errors, and audit events, and inspect outputs for representation leakage. The bounded result is a divergence and expressibility record; it neither evaluates the scientific merit of the signposts nor authorizes live monitoring.","prior_art_status":"UNSEARCHED","diversity_from_prior_proposals":"Proposal 1 governed the semantic identity of plural water-futures scenario sets as they moved among narrative, graph, spreadsheet, and simulation representations. Proposal 3 instead governs stateful signposts that monitor observations and issue advisory review alerts; it does not store or translate scenarios, and its causal path depends on temporal event handling, deterministic replay, and preserved escalation semantics. Proposal 2 governed the anonymity and round transitions of a public-health Delphi elicitation. Proposal 3 neither elicits expert judgments nor manages participants, responses, feedback, or identity separation; its actors are monitoring and policy owners, and its critical state concerns observations, revisions, missingness, thresholds, and alerts. The signpost register can be adopted for an adaptive policy without adopting either a scenario-set representation contract or a Delphi platform contract, and each earlier proposal remains independently adoptable without this register.","revision_record":{"parent_version":null,"progress_targets_addressed":["Third complete proposal","Materially different problem from proposals 1 and 2","Distinct intervention and causal path","Independent adoption boundary","Explicit diversity from every earlier proposal","Bounded falsifiable first evidence"],"conceptual_changes":[],"operational_changes":[],"evidence_changes":[],"claim_changes":[]}}