Superseded. This is an earlier draft of the methodology chapter, retained as a record of what the work believed at the time. It is not current: the composition it describes includes constrained elevation, which the design chapter withdrew after implementation established that no axis of a basis is elevatable. The current chapter is the one published under the methodology category.
The literature review made a concession in public, and this section is what keeps that concession from becoming a convenient forgetting. In its synthesis the review allowed that the claim it discharged was bounded rather than universal, and that part of what bounded it was a set of fields it had not surveyed which may already hold semantics this work would otherwise invent. It named the reading of those fields as owed, and owed specifically before the basis model is fixed. A debt named and left unscheduled is a debt disowned, so the method carries a schedule for it, and the schedule is the content of this section.
The fields, and what each might already supply
Six fields were named, each for a specific piece of machinery the basis model might need and might otherwise reinvent worse. They are named here and not cited, and the omission is the point: naming a field as possibly relevant is a statement about what this model might lack, whereas citing it would be a claim about what that field contains, and the standing rule of this work is that a source is read in full before any claim is attached to it. These fields have not been read. They are cited when they have been, and the reading is what this section schedules. Evidence theory, in its Dempster-Shafer and subjective-logic forms, for the representation of corroboration, conflict, and dependence between separate items of evidence. Decision theory, for how the sufficiency of a basis relates to the consequence of the act it would support and to the choice being made. Trust management, for existing semantics of delegated authority and its constrained elevation. Contract-based design and runtime assurance, for where and how a barrier of this kind is enforced, and for pre-condition and post-condition machinery at it. Epistemic logic, for the formal representation of what an owner is entitled to claim. And proof-carrying code, as the architectural precedent for carrying a justification alongside the artefact it justifies rather than leaving it to be reconstructed downstream.
Naming them this way is the whole of what this section does with them. The point of the list is not to survey these fields here, which would be a second literature review smuggled into the methodology, but to record precisely which semantics are at risk of being reinvented and where the prior art for each would be found. What the reading concludes is design-chapter work and is not pre-empted here.
The sequence, and why its order is load-bearing
The reading is scheduled as a sequence rather than a task, because the order in which it happens determines whether it is useful or wasted. The sequence is: draft the smallest basis model that could plausibly work; identify from that draft which of its semantics are actually load-bearing, among dependence, corroboration, authority, freshness, scope, consequence, and promotion; pressure-test only those load-bearing semantics against the fields above; and only then stabilise the model.
The order matters in both directions, and each direction guards against a distinct way of getting it wrong. Reading the six literatures speculatively, before a draft model has shown which semantics carry weight, is a way to spend months in adjacent fields and return with erudition rather than a decision, because without the draft there is no way to tell which of a field's offerings are relevant to this model and which are furniture. Freezing the model before the reading is the opposite failure and the more damaging one: it is how a project ends up with a home-made version of dependence between evidence that evidence theory settled decades ago, or a promotion rule that trust management already has in a better form. The draft comes first so the reading is targeted; the reading comes before the freeze so the model is not fixed on invented semantics that a mature field would have supplied.
The trigger
Because the debt is scheduled rather than merely intended, it needs a point at which it fires, and the sequence above supplies it. The trigger is the completion of the smallest-model draft and the identification of its load-bearing semantics. At that point, and not before, the targeted reading against the six fields becomes due, and the model may not be treated as stable until that reading has been done against whichever of its semantics turned out to carry weight. This is the commitment in operational form: not an intention to consult adjacent fields at some point, but a named condition after which the basis model cannot be called finished while the debt is still outstanding.
What this section does is schedule that reading and fix the order and the trigger of it. It does not begin the reading, and beginning it here would be the error the sequence exists to prevent, since there is not yet a draft model to tell the reading what to look for. The debt is recorded, ordered, and given a firing condition. Discharging it belongs to the design work, at the point the schedule names.