Profile: investigation¶
Deliverable: evidence-backed findings — a report, a knowledge base, a public dataset of claims — where the work is judged on whether each assertion holds up, not on whether a pipeline runs.
Declare: add **Profile:** investigation near the top of PROJECT_CHARTER.md.
Required artifacts¶
Universal only. The docs/data/ contract triad is NOT required. If your investigation also publishes a curated dataset as a product in its own right, use the database profile for that work instead of bolting contracts onto this one.
Adopt the claims-gate extension (extensions/claims-gate/). It is the defining artifact of this profile.
Reproducibility / verify¶
"Reproducible" = every published claim traces to an archived source at a stated evidence tier. There is no rebuild to run; the verification is that nothing reached the findings without passing the gate.
Claims enter a staging ledger and are only promoted when they meet the tier bar:
| Tier | Meaning |
|---|---|
| E1 | Primary document, archived locally (court filing, contract, registry entry) |
| E2 | Named on-record source, or a second independent primary |
| E3 | Credible secondary reporting, attributed |
| E4 | Single unverified source — may inform direction, never publishable |
| E5 | Rumour — recorded so it is not rediscovered, never promoted |
Declare a verify command in ## Stack that runs the gate check: no Promoted claim may sit below your publication threshold, and none may carry a dead or missing source link. Archive the source, don't just link it — the web decays faster than an investigation closes.
Default roles¶
Orchestrator · Domain Expert (the lead investigator or editor — owns whether a claim is supportable) · Producer (researcher / data gatherer) · Fact-checker as a distinct role from whoever wrote the claim · QA.
The separation matters more here than anywhere else in the framework: the author of a claim is the worst possible judge of whether it clears the bar.
Layout emphasis¶
docs/investigation/claims_gate.md for the ledger, an archive directory for retrieved sources (with retrieval dates), docs/domain/ for the entity and terminology definitions that keep two researchers from meaning different things by the same name.
Notes on language and jurisdiction¶
Investigations are frequently conducted in the subject's language. Write your content in whatever language fits — only the structural labels the checker reads must stay English (see PORTABILITY.md). Where publication carries legal exposure, record the review as a decision with a named authority; that record is the thing that will be asked for.
Evidence¶
A Spanish-language corruption investigation, whose staging-and-promotion pattern the claims-gate extension was extracted from, and where the gate caught a headline figure that was wrong by a factor of four ($25B → $5.55B) before publication. This is the one profile currently grounded in a single implementation rather than two; it is included because that implementation produced the framework's most transferable pattern, but the design should be revisited against a second investigation before it is treated as settled.