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flexo-rtm-research

Design, research synthesis, and decision rationale for the flexo-rtm standards + software repo.

This wiki is a published mirror. Source of truth: wiki/ in the main repo. To suggest changes, open a PR against the main repo — see CONTRIBUTING.md.

What this is

flexo-rtm-research is the design-and-rationale companion to the forthcoming flexo-rtm standards + software repo — a verifiable self-certification protocol for bidirectional requirements traceability of SysMLv2 models, anchored in open source and self-hostable on Flexo MMS.

This wiki holds the canonical design spec, internal/external research synthesis, certification-model documents, adapter contracts, reproducibility analysis, and the Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) that lock the design. It is the artifact reviewers read in depth before implementation of flexo-rtm begins.

The thesis (8 propositions)

The load-bearing claims of the design. One-line summaries here; full prose lives in Mission and Thesis.

1. Traditional bidirectional traceability is the trusted primary. v0.1 ships forward + backward analysis with coverage statistics, in the form Doors/Jama/OSLC practitioners already recognize. No commitment to topological framework required to adopt.
2. Named-approver attestations (satisfaction / adequacy / sufficiency) are structurally enforced. Three rtm:Attestation subclasses; SHACL sh:minCount 1 ; sh:nodeKind sh:IRI on rtm:approvedBy rejects unaccountable attestations at write time. ADCS regression compatible.
3. External URI references (git+commit, content addresses, OCI digests) are the open-source foundation. Evidence, models, and activities reference content outside the RDF via URI. These references — not the RDF metadata in isolation — are the source of true open-source interoperability, portability, auditability, and reproducibility.
4. Cryptography by composition of battle-tested standards, never invention. git GPG/SSH signing + W3C VC Data Integrity + DSSE/in-toto + Sigstore (cosign + Rekor) + OCI image signatures. v0.1 ships vocabulary and composable optional profiles for each surface. No custom crypto.
5. Identity by thin projection of external authoritative sources, never ownership. No authentication, no credentials. Named approvers are IRIs referencing identities owned by institutional SSO / LDAP / GitHub. Three SPARQL-evaluable policy primitives (RBAC, ABAC, scope-based). One SHACL bottleneck.
6. Methodology agnosticism is a foundational axiom. flexo-rtm does not commit to any specific assurance methodology. INCOSE / ISO 15288, DO-178C, NASA Phase A–F, ISO 9001, Agile, MIL-STD-498, and custom phasing participate on equal footing.
7. Verifiability requires reproducibility at multiple levels. RDF-internal (RDFC-1.0 + transcript replay), external (re-fetch git+commit / content-hash / OCI digest, re-execute, compare), accountability (git-signed commits matching rtm:approvedBy), signed envelopes, and identity projection — all composed for end-to-end open-source verifiable self-certification.
8. Reproducibility is structural and local; verification is federated. Each fact is structurally complete for its own local context — RDF neighborhood, external URIs, projection-at-cert-time, signatures sufficient to reproduce it in isolation. A verifier with adequate local permissions for a specific fact can re-execute that fact alone. Reproduction federates computationally and organizationally. No central coordination required.

Relationship to other repos

• flexo-rtm — the implementation repo (built after this wiki is reviewed). Will hold the formal spec, oracle code, ontology, conformance suite, and OSLC adapters.
• flexo-conflict-resolution-policy-research — the sibling vault analyzing constraint-aware merge synthesis. flexo-rtm's storage layer adopts its conclusions; see Flexo Git Coexistence.
• ADCS-lifecycle-demo — the prototype that proves the pattern end-to-end (8-stage pipeline, 166 tests, live Flexo integration). v0.1's regression corpus. See ADCS Prototype Lessons.
• INCOSE IS 2026 paper — Formalizing Document Assurance: A Topological Framework for Verification, Validation, and Human Accountability (Zargham 2026), submitted. Articulates the topological framework as a related research line (not flexo-rtm's destination — see ADR-032 Methodology Agnosticism as Foundational Axiom); the paper's named-approver accountability principle is part of what flexo-rtm IS. See INCOSE IS 2026 Paper.
• OpenMBEE — the open-source MBSE ecosystem flexo-rtm targets. Both flexo-rtm-research and flexo-rtm transfer to OpenMBEE at the MVP service milestone.

Where to start (reading paths)

• "I want to understand the thesis" → Mission and Thesis → Verifiable Self-Certification → Traditional Forward and Backward Analysis
• "I want to evaluate the design decisions" → Design Spec (especially §9.A acceptance criteria and §14 locked decisions) → scan ADRs in the sidebar's Decision Log section
• "I want to dive into a specific boundary" → use the sidebar's v0.1 Certification Model section, or Map of Content for the comprehensive index with one-line annotations per page

License

This wiki and the companion repo use a three-license strategy (Apache-2.0 / CC-BY-4.0 / CC0-1.0). See LICENSE.md in the main repo. Every wiki page carries an SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0 header.

Citation

Citation block for the INCOSE IS 2026 paper will be added in INCOSE IS 2026 Paper once publication is finalized.