05 - Standards, Schemas, and Conformance

Component 05 — Standards, Schemas, and Conformance Component 05 functions as the constitutional layer of the Biological Stability Modeling Initiative (BSMI). It defines what it means to perform BSMI-conformant work and establishes the governance, epistemic, and technical conditions under which claims made within the project are considered legitimate, comparable, and cumulative. This component specifies the rules of admissibility for data, analyses, blueprints, and interpretations presented as part of BSMI. It binds all project outputs—including those authored by the core project team—and constrains how the framework may be extended, applied, or critiqued. Component 05 covers: Epistemic Hygiene and Methodological Standards The project’s core expectations for conceptual clarity, scope discipline, and truthful closure. These standards govern how stability representations may be interpreted, how uncertainty and limitation must be declared, and how claims are bounded by conformance level. Minimum Information for Stability Biology (MISTAB v0.1) A set of mandatory checklists specifying the metadata, design detail, and contextual information that MUST be recorded for experiments, simulations, re-analyses, and external dataset audits. MISTAB enables joinability, reuse, and auditability across organisms, perturbation families, and timescales. Core Data Schema Specification (v0.1) Canonical schemas for stability datasets, including required field names, long/tidy formats, units, and controlled vocabularies. Controlled values for schema-governed fields are authoritative as defined in Component 10 (Codebook and Taxonomy); ad-hoc or free-form substitutions invalidate conformance for affected fields. Versioning and Conformance Rules Explicit rules for declaring the status of datasets, code, analytical runs, blueprints, and wikis (e.g., exploratory, provisional, canonical). Claim scope MUST be constrained to what the declared conformance level supports (for example: exploratory-only, non-portable, non-comparable, or geometry-only outcomes). Governance, Licensing, and Stewardship Licensing and governance arrangements designed to preserve openness, prevent enclosure, and maintain long-term commons integrity, including the project’s Anti-Enshittification Charter. These provisions define acceptable reuse, attribution, and downstream modification while protecting the cumulative research substrate. v0.1 Canonical Posture The canonical execution and onboarding posture for BSMI release v0.1, including: R-first onboarding for reference implementations CSV-canonical data releases Ψ tiering, with axis-level outputs plus psi_demo Governance of formal, portable Ψ deferred to Component 50 (Measurement Models and Indices) Any dataset, analysis, blueprint, or interpretation described as “BSMI-conformant” MUST satisfy the requirements laid out in this component, including MISTAB v0.1 and the Core Data Schema Specification v0.1. Nonconformant work is permitted, but MUST be explicitly labeled as such, with deviations recorded and claim scope constrained accordingly. Unlabeled or ambiguous deviations render conformance claims invalid. Component 05 isn't aspirational. It is enforcement-bearing. Its purpose is to ensure that Stability Biology functions as a governed, cumulative science rather than a collection of loosely related methods or narratives.