06 — Verification: Acceptance Tests, Claim States, Blockers
version v0.33.67 date 8 September 2026
← 05 The Workbench↗ · Pack hub↗ · 00 README↗
The Rule This File Enforces
Every claim carries a state, and
unevidencedis the default.
Settled 4 September. It applies to this pack about itself, which is why the status column below is mostly unevidenced and why that is the correct reading rather than an embarrassing one. Nothing here is built. A pack that marked its own tests as passing before the work existed would fail the discipline it specifies.
The Acceptance Tests
Thirteen tests. The dev brief lists twelve and numbers two of them 10; the duplicate is recorded in the corrections section below rather than silently fixed, and the list is renumbered here to 13.
| # | Test | Why | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A named real entity resolves from its published slug and its boundary renders | The join is live rather than illustrated | unevidenced — blocked, see below |
| 2 | Every provision node carries the hash of its source bytes and a retrieval date | The provenance claim, checkable | unevidenced |
| 3 | The markdown of the instrument rebuilds from the graph byte for byte | The method site's own standard, applied here | unevidenced |
| 4 | A provision links to the page or byte range that produced it, and the viewer opens it | What makes test 2 more than an assertion | unevidenced |
| 5 | Nodes derived from their data are visually distinct from nodes that are our model | The two-edge discipline, and the thing a partner will check first | unevidenced |
| 6 | Zoom into an entity, a law and a provision, and each expands under identical rules | The fractal test | unevidenced |
| 7 | The same query returns the same nodes on a rerun | Deterministic, which is the reason to build it at all | unevidenced |
| 8 | The vault opens read-only for a stranger and asks for nothing | The shareable form, as the Risk Graph Explorer already does | unevidenced |
| 9 | The demonstration is citable by version | A release is the same objects rather than a copy that drifted | asserted — release channel configured at this commit; not yet exercised by a third party |
| 10 | The compiled table is one artefact rather than thousands of files | The write-amplification measurement of 7 September, applied | unevidenced |
| 11 | Every computed number is shown beside the query that produced it, and the retrieval date | A number without its query is an assertion | unevidenced |
| 12 | The compiled artefact is checkable against the retrieved JSON it came from | The provenance claim, end to end | unevidenced |
| 13 | The pack is in the vault as its first commit and is readable before anything is built | The method, demonstrated by the artefact | programmatic-out-of-band — this file is that commit. Verifiable from the vault's own history |
Test 13 is the only one that passes today, and it passes by construction. That is the intended state of a pack published before its implementation.
Blockers, Recorded Rather Than Worked Around
B1 — Egress policy refuses data.ungovr.org
Status: open. It blocks tests 1, 2, 3, 4, 10 and 12.
The session that would perform the retrieval cannot reach the host over its shell. The proxy's own log:
{
"ts": "2026-09-08T22:13:06.108Z",
"kind": "connect_rejected",
"detail": "gateway answered 403 to CONNECT (policy denial or upstream failure)",
"host": "data.ungovr.org:443"
}This is the same failure the research brief of 8 September records, where an issued API key could not be used because the session's egress policy refused the authenticated host. It is now confirmed to apply to the open endpoints too, not only the authenticated ones. That is new information and it is worse than the earlier finding.
One path is open and it was deliberately not taken. A web-fetch tool can reach the host, and it returns model-summarised text rather than raw bytes. A retrieval through that path cannot carry a response_sha256, because there are no source bytes to hash — only a paraphrase of them. Committing such a payload as if it were a retrieval would put a false provenance record at the root of a vault whose entire argument is provenance.
So nothing was fetched. The pack ships with the retrieval specified and unrun.
| Resolution path | Cost | Preference |
|---|---|---|
| Run the fetch from an environment with unrestricted egress and commit the raw bytes | Low. It is four open endpoints and one bulk download | Preferred |
| Have the bulk JSON supplied directly and hash it on arrival | Low, and the provenance holds if the supplier records their own retrieval | Acceptable |
Fetch through the summarising path and mark every node method: transcribed-through-model, with no content hash | Low effort, high cost to the argument | Rejected |
The rejection is the finding. A vault that argues for byte-level provenance and then ships transcribed data has refuted itself in its first commit.
B2 — The two key-gated corpora remain unread
Status: open, and it is the same blocker as B1 plus a key question.
/ai-laws/* and /cgj/reports/{id}.json are gated behind X-API-Key. These are the two most interesting endpoints to this work and neither has been read.
The AI-laws corpus matters beyond this vault: the conformance work of 4 September left 1,064 crosswalks with nothing to resolve into, blocked until another framework is published as a graph. Whether UnGovr's AI-law corpus is a graph or only per-jurisdiction verdicts is the single most valuable question to ask them, because one answer unblocks a parked item.
B3 — The instrument's source format is unknown
Status: open. It gates test 3.
The EU AI Act vault was tractable because Formex XML exists. Whether the California Public Records Act has an Akoma Ntoso rendering, or a published XML source of comparable quality, has not been established.
If Californian statute is available only as HTML, the byte-for-byte rebuild claim is weaker and the decomposition is harder. That must be stated in the vault rather than discovered by a reader. Resolve this before writing any parser, because it may change which provision — or which instrument — the worked example uses.
B4 — The entity slug is not known
Status: open, downstream of B1.
The Santa Barbara County slug has deliberately not been guessed. It is resolved from /entities/us/ca.json and transcribed verbatim. A guessed slug in a vault about published identifier spaces would be the most embarrassing possible defect.
B5 — Upstream: no collection roots for pinned releases
Status: open, upstream, not fixable here.
There are no collection roots yet, so when garbage collection is built, pinned commits must become roots or a published release could be collected out from under a live link. This vault's citation story depends on that being resolved upstream. It is recorded here so that a reader relying on a pinned link knows the dependency exists.
Corrections Recorded Beside The Thing
A correction is a proposal recorded beside the thing rather than an edit to it, and no file has two writers. Two are open against the source briefs.
| # | Against | Correction |
|---|---|---|
| C1 | The dev brief's acceptance-test table | Two rows are numbered 10. The tests themselves are distinct and both are kept. Renumbered to 13 above; the source is not edited |
| C2 | The research brief's finding on egress | It records that the authenticated host was refused. The open host is refused too. Recorded here rather than as an edit to that brief |
What Would Make This Pack Wrong
Stated in advance, because a specification that cannot be refuted is not one.
| If this turns out to be true | Then |
|---|---|
Their open_records.law coverage is near-total and richly structured | The gap this vault exists to close is smaller than claimed, and the argument shrinks to the provision layer alone |
| The CPRA has no usable machine-readable source | Test 3 cannot pass and the honest move is to say so and pick a different instrument, not to weaken the test |
| The cross-references to GeoNames, Wikidata, OCD and FIPS are exposed | The join is cheaper than described and part of 02__the-model.md↗ is over-engineered |
| DuckDB-WASM cannot carry the workload on a cold open | The recommendation in 05__the-workbench.md↗ is wrong and should be replaced with the proven SQLite path |
| UnGovr already publishes the coverage number | Computation 1 is not new, and the honest response is to cite theirs and check it rather than to present it as a finding |
Honest Tensions
| Tension | Note |
|---|---|
| Showing a partner the gap in their data | It is the clearest possible argument, and it is a stranger telling them their model is short by one edge |
| Building on a snapshot | It is reproducible and dated, and it is stale the moment they push |
| One county, one law | Depth beats breadth for a demonstration, and one instance proves nothing about coverage |
| Our nodes on their graph | The attach-never-mutate rule makes it safe, and a viewer renders both as one dataset unless the classes are visibly distinct |
| The determinism claim | The strongest property here, and it holds only while both address schemes are stable |
| Building a corrections path before asking | It demonstrates the point, and it implies their data needs correcting. Ships empty |
| Doing this before the meeting | A built thing beats a slide, and arriving with one can read as presumption rather than as effort |
Open Questions
| Question | Notes |
|---|---|
| Is the AI and crawling law corpus a graph, or only per-jurisdiction verdicts? | The ask with the highest value. It unblocks 1,064 parked crosswalks |
| Are the GeoNames, Wikidata, OCD and FIPS cross-references exposed in the API? | On the platform page, absent from the schema |
| Do we ask before publishing a vault built on their data? | The licence permits it with attribution. Asking is not required and is probably right |
| How does a snapshot stay honest as their data moves? | The retrieval date is the minimum. A refresh cadence is the real answer |
| Does the corrections offer go in the vault, or stay a conversation? | Built, and shipped empty, per 04__the-vault.md↗ |
| Does this vault join the catalogue immediately? | Yes. Under a minute, and a graph vault absent from the index argues against its own method |
This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).