Derivation contracts

Every contract indexed below is normative. Files have one semantic owner; requirements use permanent global IDs independent of that owner's filename. The schema owns shape, defaults, and structural constraints. Contracts own shared and operation-local behavior. Examples demonstrate the contracts.

Read the relevant block, then follow its dependencies. The blocks are reading order, not execution phases; execution/lifecycle owns the sequence of a run.

Specification

Contract	Status	Owns
Specification structure	normative	Declare identifiers, columns, derivation coverage, and source notation.
Specification composition	normative	Resolve inherited layers into one minimal, ordered specification.
Name binding	normative	Resolve input datasets, current-output columns, and ODM item reads.
Specification style	normative	Fix one written form of a specification and report departures without changing its meaning.

Values

Contract	Status	Owns
Types and conversion	normative	Define column types, missing normalization, compatibility, and conversion.
Numeric values	normative	Define numeric representation, promotion, conversion, and overflow.
Text values	normative	Define Unicode scalar identity, preservation, equality, and order.
Temporal values	normative	Define dates, local civil datetimes, precision, canonical text, and order.

Execution

Contract	Status	Owns
Execution lifecycle	normative	Sequence resolution, row construction, dependency evaluation, value completion, and output checks.
Row construction	normative	Construct output rows from declared input records or groups.
Ordering	normative	Apply ordering terms, missing placement, stable ties, and final artifact order.
Local handlers	normative	Handle conditions at their expression or conversion site and report substitutions.
Verification	normative	Apply assertions, severity, grouped counts, and warning logs to completed values.

Operations

Contract	Status	Owns
Expression evaluation	normative	Register and dispatch expressions, restrict nesting, and define scalar selection.
Predicates	normative	Evaluate the closed Boolean language using three-valued logic.
Numeric computation	normative	Evaluate written arithmetic formulas without reassociation or presentation rounding.
Aggregation	normative	Reduce eligible records in one of the three permitted key scopes.
Lookup and joins	normative	Match declared keys, narrow records, select a result, and answer absence.
Windows	normative	Partition constructed output rows and compute ranks, neighbors, and baseline selections.
Text operations	normative	Apply casing, inline mapping, templates, and portable regular expressions.
Temporal operations	normative	Compute calendar differences, study days, date completion, and precision.
Project functions	normative	Verify installed packages against the held lock and validate function inputs, results, and inline activation tests.

Storage

Contract	Status	Owns
Resource resolution	normative	Confine declared source paths and read one immutable snapshot per physical file.
Source ingestion	normative	Select input profiles and assign source field types without inferring values.
CSV profile	normative	Read admitted CSV spellings and write canonical CSV bytes and display precision.
Parquet profile	normative	Read and write the closed Parquet field and value mapping.
Artifact publication	normative	Select artifact columns and profiles and publish complete files atomically.

Submission

Contract	Status	Owns
Submission metadata	normative	Govern dataset and column metadata, origin, methods, and document references.
Controlled terminology	normative	Declare codelists once and validate their bindings and allowed values.
Define-XML	normative	Compose study metadata into deterministic Define-XML 2.1 documents.
Dataset-JSON	normative	Write a dataset and its submission metadata as one deterministic Dataset-JSON 1.1 file.

Reference

Contract	Status	Owns
Schema language	normative	Define schema notation, registries, constraints, and canonical shorthand expansion.

Requirement and compatibility index.