Artefact Suite Handoff Contracts
The five artefacts of this thesis are built in sequence, and each one inherits a defined product from the artefact before it and leaves a defined product for the artefact after. Stating those handoffs explicitly is what allows each chapter to check its inputs locally rather than re-derive them from the whole suite. The artefacts are laid down in build order: the standardisation schema (Chapter 5); the Governed Kernel Architecture (Chapter 6); the notation (Chapter 7); the empirical substrate (Chapter 8); and the procedural generation and documentation prototype, the generator (Chapter 9), whose output is evaluated in Chapter 10. The empirical substrate of Chapter 8 is sealed before the generator of Chapter 9 is built, because the generator consumes that substrate.
The handoff chain
The chain runs standardisation schema → Governed Kernel Architecture → notation → empirical substrate → generator → Chapter 10 evaluation. The table below records, for each artefact, the chapter that develops it, what it produces, what it requires from upstream, and what it checks before passing its product on. The empirical substrate is the point at which the representational stack of the schema, the kernel architecture, and the notation meets the corpus evidence; the generator then consumes that substrate together with those three upstream contracts.
| Artefact (chapter) | What it produces | What it requires upstream | What it checks before handing on |
|---|---|---|---|
| The standardisation schema (Chapter 5) | Governed schema rows carrying identity, class, mapping, and residual fields | The SDA clause set, the ambiguity baseline, and the foundational primitive inventory | Identity uniqueness, class completeness, mapping traceability, and residual declaration |
| The Governed Kernel Architecture (Chapter 6) | The module taxonomy, interaction rules, and module-level constraints | The standardisation schema’s outputs and primitive semantics | Module-boundary coherence and dependency traceability |
| The notation (Chapter 7) | The notation grammar, symbol constraints, and representation rules | The Governed Kernel Architecture’s module definitions and constraints | Notation completeness and parse/validation consistency |
| The empirical substrate (Chapter 8) | The sealed dimensional, occurrence, topological, and configurational evidence over the corpus | The Governed Kernel Architecture’s taxonomy and the notation, applied to the empirical corpus | Corpus integrity and census completeness |
| The generator (Chapter 9) | The procedural generation and documentation protocol | The schema, kernel-architecture, and notation contracts and the empirical substrate | Reproducibility and audit completeness, before handing to Chapter 10 |
What Chapter 5 commits to downstream
The standardisation schema makes five commitments that the rest of the suite relies on, and each is backed by evidence an examiner can inspect. Baseline ambiguity and fragmentation are measured, with the measurements held in the corpus-integrity, polysemy, and structural-metrics appendices (SDA Corpus Integrity Metrics, Polysemy Metrics and Confidence, and Trigram and POS Structural Metrics). The schema design fields are decision-complete, as set out in Chapter 5, Sections 5.3 and 5.4. Mapping quality is reported together with its residuals in Foundational Mapping Coverage. The full results and the downloadable release artefacts are exposed in SDA Results and Data Package. And the constraints that bind the downstream handoff are stated in Chapter 5, Section 5.11, and in the contracts below.
The Chapter 6 to Chapter 7 contracts
Four formal contracts govern the transmission of the Governed Kernel Architecture from Chapter 6 to the notation of Chapter 7. Each names the substrate Chapter 7 inherits and the property its grammar must preserve; the full prose specification is in Chapter 6, Section 6.5, and the four-row summary follows.
| Contract | Inherited substrate | Binding obligation on Chapter 7 |
|---|---|---|
| HC-6A — Governed Kernel Transmission | The stratified vocabulary of seven primitives and seven composites and ten relation operators of Section 6.4, with the four-layer derivation hierarchy (vocabulary → taxonomy → constituents → interaction rules) | The notation grammar formalises the inherited substrate without semantic reinterpretation: no additional primitives, no revised module types, and no altered cardinality bounds may be introduced during formalisation |
| HC-6B — Governed Instance Library | The baseline library of 25 minimum entries spanning ENT, CIR, SAN, BED, LIV, KIT, SVC, EXT, and DWL across the FA, UD, RB, and LV design categories, each validated against the constraint-status schema of Section 6.4 | Chapter 7 accepts the baseline library as the governed instance library and validates notation expressions against the 25 entries without breaching governed-kernel contracts; entries whose constraint status is false may not be deployed |
| HC-6C — Verification Sequence Constraint | The three-level nesting hierarchy — declaration (primitive-plane modules), interaction (configurative-plane modules), and composition (the dwelling-aggregate module) — derived from the planimetric triad’s dependency structure | Chapter 7’s grammar encodes the nesting hierarchy so that verification ordering syntactically preserves the semantic dependencies declared in Chapter 6; placing a higher-tier expression before its lower-tier prerequisites is impossible in a well-formed representation |
| HC-6D — Interface Type Expressibility | The three governed-kernel interface types — semantic (shared-entity consistency, ownership, vocabulary closure), transformation (containment and propagation), and verification (localisation, cascade, sequence) — confirmed by the Section 6.4 interoperability check | Chapter 7’s notation expresses all three interface types, so that the Chapter 8 demonstration cases and Chapter 9 procedural generation can route requirements to the correct interface; each type is encodable as a distinct grammar mechanism without conflation |
Evidence discipline across the suite
The handoffs rest on one discipline applied throughout: each substantive claim is tied either to an evidence appendix or to a cited scholarly source, no claim depends on a path outside the deposited materials, and residual limitations are declared wherever the evidence remains partial.