Discovery and source context

Normative boundary

DE01 Preserve intent and human-agent parity

Retain the request and its interpretation: requested result kind and cardinality, hard constraints, ranking preferences, explicit wildcards and material omitted choices. Interpretation and supplied assumptions need an origin and review state. Unknown intent does not become a default, and an explicit wildcard is a search instruction, not a field value on a measurement. A preference cannot override a hard constraint.

Equivalent natural-language and agent requests carry the same substantive obligations. If they differ, disclose the discrepancy and obtain clarification where it affects the answer. Several qualified candidates may answer a broad discovery request. When one answer requires an omitted choice, preserve the alternatives and identify that choice.

DE02 Identify permitted source material and exact membership

Declare the task, applicable profile/version, source policy and exact permitted inventory or a pinned manifest that resolves it. Identify observation/report editions, source locations, metadata and mapping versions, numeric dependencies and exclusions where relevant. Record unresolved identity or version source material explicitly. Inventory membership must be reconstructable within the permitted inputs. Equal counts do not prove equal sets.

Keep the permitted inventory separate from evaluated, selected, excluded and unresolved members. References resolve within the declared boundary; an external URL or hash alone does not supply uninspected content, prove authenticity or authorize enrichment. Expected answers and evaluation labels are not source material inputs.

DEC-0017's direct authoritative source boundary applies. Conceptual-reference material or a redistributor pointer may motivate acquisition, but cannot itself supply a UCEM economic record or binding. A subsequent interpretation needs separately admitted direct-publisher source material and its provenance. Source authority does not establish interpretation certainty.

DE03 Preserve candidate meaning and useful answer content

For each evaluated candidate retain its exact record/edition and relevant mapping identity, source material locators, supported field agreement, contradiction and unresolved findings against the request. Reuse SC04's separate knowledge, origin, authority and numeric-availability distinctions. Two unknown fields do not establish agreement. Uninspected metadata remains uninspected even when a source link is present.

A known hard-constraint contradiction cannot be presented as satisfaction. A potentially relevant candidate with unresolved required source material may remain discoverable as unresolved; it is not thereby admissible for substitution or calculation. Ranking and model confidence supply neither field source material nor semantic authority.

An answer must retain material requested content, including applicable value/statement, unit/scale, denominator, population, comparison, construction, time, attribution and uncertainty. Shared context is allowed when it resolves inside the inventory. A citation alone does not replace a material qualification expressly needed to interpret the answer. Preserve useful native partial results and explicit conflicts without inventing missing values, numeric age limits, exact methods or statistical authority. Research disclosures remain governed by DEC-0022 within its accepted scope.

DE04 Declare availability policy and temporal precision

A time-bounded context states whether it concerns public availability, possession by a named system, reviewed interpretation available to that system, or an explicit combination. Each policy needs its own source material. Public release does not prove system possession; present possession does not prove past possession; later review cannot be backdated.

Identify cutoff instant or interval, timezone, precision and inclusion convention. Keep reference period, publication, acquisition, metadata update and mapping/review time in their own roles. A date-only publication may leave an intraday cutoff unresolved; do not invent midnight or a timezone. The already accepted latest-eligible operation retains its inclusive exact cutoff. A prior observation period does not prove prior publication.

Apply the declared vintage policy to metadata and interpretations as well as numbers. Later explanatory material may support explicitly retrospective interpretation; it cannot by itself establish earlier wording, earlier review or unchanged historical methodology. For a context without a temporal eligibility claim, state that no cutoff is applied rather than inventing clock precision. Material source-edition and reference-time limits still apply.

DE05 Separate eligibility from selection

For each member assessed under an availability policy, preserve whether eligibility is established, contradicted or unresolved, with supporting source material. Separately state selection, older eligible status, exclusion for meaning, unresolved ordering or another explained selection result. If a member was not evaluated, say so; do not invent findings for it.

Declare the requested meaning, period, edition policy, selection rule and tie policy. A potentially decisive newer candidate with unresolved eligibility prevents a definitive latest claim. A qualified provisional answer may expose an older eligible record together with that limitation. Arbitrary input order cannot establish unique latest among tied or unorderable editions. A declared tie policy may return all tied candidates or request a further choice; it cannot invent temporal precedence.

These are documentation findings, not new SC08 dispositions or a general latest-selection operation. Where an existing SC09 operation applies, preserve its scope and preconditions. Describing selection uncertainty faithfully does not make that operation supported.

DE06 Bound coverage and negative results

Distinguish completeness of an inventory audit from publisher holdings, source catalogue, response acquisition, extraction, historical archive and semantic interpretation coverage. Record exact evaluated members, truncation, failures, omissions and potentially relevant unresolved records. A complete audit of supplied releases does not establish a full archive.

A definitive no-match claim requires exhaustive evaluation of the named finite inventory and documented disqualification of every member under the stated hard constraints. Retain a potentially relevant unresolved member as uncertainty. If evaluation is partial, report its actual boundary. Transport success, access errors, empty approximate retrieval, timeout or budget exhaustion do not establish zero observations or exhaustive absence. A valid bounded no-match does not establish publisher-wide or world-wide absence.

DE07 Preserve context and explicit follow-up

The result identifies the context/version actually used: request and interpretation, permitted inventory, applicable rules, evaluated/selected/excluded members, source material, temporal policy where applicable, unknowns, coverage and separate use limitations. Missing or inapplicable parts are explained; no canonical field layout is required.

Return material clarification choices and missing source material or numeric-input roles with their acceptance conditions. Distinguish a planned acquisition from an observed receipt. New source material, changed membership, a corrected mapping or changed policy creates a distinguishable subsequent context; retain the previous result and its original boundary. A follow-up cannot silently fill the old context from another case, a parent dossier or live resources. Newly admitted source material still needs its applicable meaning and authority checks before an operation can use it. This requirement adopts no transition engine.

DE08 Conformance and existing operation boundaries

Full context conformance assesses DE01-DE08, using resolved shared descriptions where appropriate. State applicability for each disclosure group; inapplicability needs a context-specific reason. Unknown applicability is unresolved, not inapplicable. Faithful partial/conflicting documentation may conform while a selection or operation remains unsupported. A restricted case names its exercised obligations and cannot establish full profile conformance. Supported positive and useful partial answers are required when the supplied task and source material justify them; uniformly refusing all cases fails this profile.

Paper review uses three editorial findings: meets, violates and not_assessable. Meets means the supplied context/answer satisfies the exercised obligations. Violates identifies a visible breach and retains material secondary findings. Not_assessable applies only when the required candidate or review source material is absent so the requested judgment cannot be made; it cannot hide a visible violation or penalize an explicitly disclosed unknown. Equivalent decisive explanations are acceptable. These labels are not canonical API enums.

SC01-SC12 and DEC-0022 keep their existing meanings, order and scope. Apply SC08 separately only to a requested economic operation within that framework, preserving out-of-scope boundaries and secondary findings. A discovery or descriptive request alone has no SC08 disposition. This profile adds no economic operation, independent-source equivalence, causal certification, pooling, coefficient conversion or statistical inference. It adopts no CH, IF, FC or DS draft clause by reference, and prescribes no syntax, implementation, index, scoring method, extractor, model training, source pipeline or service deployment.