imbad0202__academic-research-skills/audits/575-source-backed-proving-set-2026-08-24.md

#575 source-backed proving-set audit — 2026-08-24

Scope: one bounded, real-source fixture for Software Engineering × MSR 2027 × Technical Papers × Full Paper, with the ACM SIGSOFT Repository Mining Standard selected as an overlay.

Result: the live registry now exercises all four authority partitions with three official venue/type rows, one field/society row, one reporting/design overlay row, and the four retained broad fallbacks. This is an architecture proving set, not a field, venue, or method coverage claim. It does not close #575: the separately frozen #684 two-expert evaluation and blind adjudication remain open, and this agent-curated source check does not stand in for a maintainer's human sign-off.

Bound declaration and registry receipt

The executable declaration is scripts/fixtures/review_target_context/msr-2027-technical-full-declaration.json. It is an illustrative fixture that models the closed state produced after a hypothetical author confirmation. It is not an attestation by an author of a real manuscript. The modeled values are:

Axis	Modeled exact value
discipline	Software Engineering
subfield	Mining Software Repositories
venue	MSR 2027
track	Technical Papers
contribution type	Full Paper
overlay	ACM SIGSOFT Repository Mining Standard

Registry identity: ars-field-general-review-criteria@2026.08.24; canonical registry SHA-256: 826e3212aef8aefbd56ca30af4a24e8c2936cfe3f6ed852a0a56b9440903ca84. The resolver remains offline and consumes only the committed registry bytes; it does not retrieve these pages at runtime.

Source-to-row evidence

Registry row(s)	Primary source and locator	Version evidence	Decision
official.msr2027.technical.full.scope	MSR 2027 Technical Papers — Call for Papers	The publisher page exposes no revision date, ETag, or Last-Modified value. The committed receipt pins a 45,702-byte raw capture and a normalized 16,601-byte div#Call-for-Papers semantic snapshot. All three MSR criterion versions carry semantic SHA-256 2546217a5f2b7dccb3b617b976e75cf7427c9a3881fda3092323c94a35231795.	Current official exact-target row; blocking_allowed. The statement is a short paraphrase, not a mirrored policy.
official.msr2027.technical.full.validity	MSR 2027 evaluation criteria	Same mutable-page source receipt and hash-bound criterion version.	Current official exact-target row; blocking_allowed. Soundness and replicability are represented without inventing numeric weights.
official.msr2027.technical.full.open-science	MSR 2027 Open Science Policy	Same mutable-page source receipt and hash-bound criterion version.	Current official exact-target row; blocking_allowed. The paraphrase distinguishes relevant source code from anonymized and curated study data and preserves conditional disclosure barriers.
field.sigsoft.empirical.general-essential	ACM SIGSOFT General Standard at immutable commit	Commit d131d7209f2fad7e8dfd30afbd2b8ea605ea3141, 2025-02-19; raw-file SHA-256 f36d203118e22524ddee8a21e427c1191a017fd8f2cb470d3ecc3b4fc613a71f. At verification, official HEAD d7496100cda2e87beca508f9295f3f74e42dff20 had the same blob hash.	Current field/society row, but advisory_only: no source establishes MSR adoption.
overlay.sigsoft.repository-mining.essential	ACM SIGSOFT Repository Mining Standard at immutable commit	Commit 53c14e1a85aac1aeafb0788a622c5aaafec5c8b9, 2025-05-26; raw-file SHA-256 882cbfe912cc48e83f9193a447bdc1085f5c97058b3bd1bb8249714ba72e1f6d. The same verified HEAD had the same blob hash.	Current overlay row, but advisory_only: the illustrative fixture selects it and it is not presented as an MSR rule.

ACM SIGSOFT describes the collection as its official evidence standards and publishes the repository under CC0 1.0. The MSR page exposes no visible redistribution license, so the registry retains only source links and curator-authored paraphrases. The cryptographic receipts, extraction rule, and fragment mapping are committed as shared/review_criteria_sources/msr-2027-technical-papers.2026-08-24.json and shared/review_criteria_sources/sigsoft-empirical-standards.2026-08-24.json; the MSR body itself is not redistributed. Both discriminated receipt shapes validate against the closed shared/contracts/review_target/review_criteria_source_receipt.schema.json.

Registry migration receipt

The predecessor was ars-field-general-review-criteria@2026.08, canonical SHA-256 3209e681cc6dbc8ece2b0961ad3c516b7dd78aa32d045dacce76b54b5962f549. The update preserves that registry id as its lineage and increments only the version. Because V1 intentionally includes registry_version in resolved_digest, even a field-general context selecting the same four row pointers rotates from 204c4ef3c62b55886cfbfde8a0b60b3c451ece1aa118f4202fd6b002696ed6ce to b404e4cd3c21d002dc3212249d52480c3034f5debb04b0b10a1c07c21a258ebe. Consumers must recompute and explicitly rebind; an old context does not silently inherit the new registry release.

Conservative mappings and exclusions

• The MSR page alternates among “Technical Papers”, “Technical Track”, and “Research Track”. The declaration uses Technical Papers, the page's title and navigation label. V1 does not infer aliases: a fixture using one of the other source labels remains unresolved until an author explicitly confirms the canonical value.
• Full Paper is the singular registry label for the page's “Full papers” contribution class. Short work-in-progress papers do not match.
• The General Standard applies to empirical software-engineering work, but the V1 registry cannot encode the predicate “collects and analyzes data”. Its live row is therefore additionally scoped to the explicitly selected Repository Mining overlay instead of being applied to every Software Engineering manuscript.
• No source found states that MSR 2027 adopted either SIGSOFT standard. Both rows remain advisory even while current; they cannot issue blocking findings.
• A target whose venue, track, or contribution type differs from the exact declaration remains declared_target_unresolved. A missing overlay or a different discipline omits both SIGSOFT rows rather than silently widening applicability.

Hermetic proof obligations

scripts/test_resolve_review_target_context.py now pins the following without network access:

1. all nine applicable live rows resolve for the exact declaration;
2. the exact policy distribution is six blocking rows (three MSR plus three existing scientific-validity broad fallbacks) and three advisory rows (two SIGSOFT plus broad submission traceability);
3. near-miss venue, track, or contribution axes cannot impersonate the profile, and an unconfirmed source alias cannot silently rebind it;
4. SIGSOFT rows require the modeled confirmed discipline and overlay;
5. the first-verified date and stale-source advisory downgrade are enforced;
6. exact official fragments, immutable SIGSOFT commits, source receipts, current-head blob equality, and registry digests are pinned;
7. the predecessor-to-successor digest rotation is explicit; and
8. the live nine-row context completes pointer-only binding receipts for all three #684 consumers without copying criterion prose.

Remaining closure boundary

This delivery closes the live-registry scope gap recorded in audits/575-scope-closure-audit-2026-08-24.md; it does not rewrite that dated audit. #575 still cannot close until #684 retains two independent blinded human-expert label files, separate blind adjudication, the paired record, and the required measurement report. No source-backed row establishes review usefulness, calibration, field coverage, venue acceptance, or improved research outcomes.