Core rationale and open boundaries

Status: informative rationale and representation proposals. The exact accepted normative scope is in the acceptance record; its four decision records govern promotion. This page does not independently adopt a representation.

Rationale for scoped choices

Minimal representation requirements

The existing SDMX-oriented and Data Commons-oriented worksheets remain useful starting points, as recorded in the desk comparison (repository reference). This candidate adopts their separation of concepts, observations and metadata as a modeling direction, without claiming an implemented standard binding.

Any later representation must preserve definition qualifiers, observation periods, source/release identities, role-specific operation inputs, field-level source material, unresolved states, mapping authority and derivation lineage. A standard series key alone need not contain all of them. Metadata or referenced records are acceptable if the receiver can recover their semantics and source material scope.

The first representation experiment should use one positive scale conversion, one missing-adjustment case and the role-sensitive debt/GDP case. Freeze the same inputs and allowed curation for both shortlisted models. Encode, decode and compare each required assertion, unresolved state and source material reference. Report loss; do not equate successful schema validation with preserved meaning.

No representational impossibility or need for an independent EQUA evaluator has been demonstrated. New language features or runtime machinery require a concrete failure of a simpler profile or an independently justified product need.

Scope deliberately left open

• Universal equivalence across independently produced series. The new independent pair is a counterexample to premature confirmation, not the missing positive proof.
• A universal list of economically material methodologies and qualifiers.
• Geographic boundary changes beyond retaining a declared membership/version.
• Fiscal calendars, irregular periods and general stock/flow transformations.
• Currency conversion, purchasing-power parity and chain-volume reconstruction.
• Statistical uncertainty, arbitrary numeric tolerance and aggregation algebra.
• Registry governance, global identifiers, compact grammar and canonical encoding.

These exclusions bound what may later be accepted. They cannot be treated as default matches or silent permission. The specification plan (repository reference) continues to govern later milestones.

Promotion and implementation gate

The decision-process readiness findings were resolved through PR #1. DEC-0010 to DEC-0013 now accept the bounded semantic scope after fresh independent review. The acceptance record pins the clauses and conformance cases.

The next proposed experiment compares representations on three fixed cases. It must preserve the accepted meaning, unknowns and source material links while reporting any loss. This comparison informs the language milestone; it does not bypass that milestone to ship a provider integration or a general evaluator. New implementation work still needs an explicit owner, isolated worktree, frozen base, allowed paths and acceptance source material.

Fixture integrity and arithmetic tests are not tests of an implemented UCEM classifier. A later implementation must classify allowed task inputs with its own behavior and compare outcomes and decisive reasons with the accepted vectors. Positive controls, mutations and missing dependencies all matter; expected outputs cannot become inputs.