Lifecycle Overview

Knowledge evolves by appending and reconciling evidence, not by replacing inconvenient history. Claims can gain support, become disputed, go stale, remain insufficient, or be split by context as new records arrive.

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> Unresolved
    Unresolved --> Supported: coherent support added
    Unresolved --> Contradicted: adverse evidence added
    Supported --> Conflicted: credible contradiction arrives
    Contradicted --> Conflicted: credible support arrives
    Conflicted --> Supported: governed resolution
    Conflicted --> Disputed: disagreement remains material
    Supported --> Stale: freshness boundary exceeded
    Disputed --> Unresolved: new resolution evidence requested
    Stale --> Supported: source refreshed and reviewed

Evidence lifecycle

Ingestion records origin—observed, inferred, imported, or synthetic—and extraction method—manual curation, automated import, model inference, or lab capture. Quantitative support retains intervals, variance, replicate and peptide counts, localization probability, censoring, scale, and units. Artifact flags keep missing-not-at-random behavior, interference, protein ambiguity, and localization uncertainty visible.

Claims link supporting and contradicting evidence separately. Their status, evidence state, confidence, assumptions, decision impact, and proposed resolution assays can change while source records remain intact. Decision lineage connects later use back to both favorable and disputed claims.

Conflict lifecycle

Reconciliation evaluates source precedence, confidence difference, severity, context, and modality under a named policy. Possible actions include accepting higher-trust evidence, requiring curation, holding a decision, or splitting by context or modality. Each resolution records rationale, actor, time, and its effect on claim belief.

A resolved conflict is not deleted. It remains available for audit and can be revisited when a source is corrected, a reference release changes, or new evidence alters the balance.

Evidence dossier by state

State	Required contents	Permitted disposition
unresolved	input identifier, namespace, organism, context, source, and attempted resolution paths	resolve, split, or retain unresolved
supported	exact claim, contextual support, provenance, uncertainty, independence, freshness, and coverage	publish bounded support or continue review
contradicted	exact adverse relationship, context, source quality, and decision impact	publish contradiction, split context, or escalate
conflicted	competing records, shared lineage, context comparison, severity, and reconciliation policy	accept, split, hold, or require curation
disputed	unresolved competing interpretations, responsible reviewer, and evidence needed to close	remain visible and block affected decisions
stale	source version, retrieval time, freshness policy, and affected claims	refresh, supersede, or narrow the evidence posture
superseded	replacement record or review, rationale, and lineage to the previous state	remain immutable for historical reconstruction

The dossier preserves rejected and losing evidence as well as the current projection. A review result without the searched source scope, unresolved set, and competing lineage cannot distinguish “unsupported” from “not examined.”

Corrections, refresh, and reuse

Source corrections and new releases create new evidence revisions. They do not mutate the bytes or review basis cited by an earlier decision. Reusing an evidence brief requires its subject, context, source versions, freshness, coverage, and policy to remain fit for the new question.

flowchart TD
    prior["retained evidence revision"] --> change{"source, identity, context, or policy changed?"}
    change -->|no| reuse["reuse with the same declared scope"]
    change -->|yes| append["append new records and reconciliation"]
    append --> compare["compare support, contradiction, gaps, and disposition"]
    compare --> current["publish a new current projection"]
    prior -. "remains auditable" .-> current

Downstream decisions cite the exact evidence revision they consumed. A newer projection can supersede their knowledge basis, but it cannot retroactively change what those decisions knew.