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an offline map explorer where each world, from a game map to a city's open data, ships as one .atlas file

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atlas / docs / decisions / 0005-unbounded-feature-maturity.md
0005-unbounded-feature-maturity.md 2.0K source

5. Maturity is per-feature, additive, unbounded and monotone-gated

  • Date: 2026-08-02
  • Status: accepted
  • Where it is written down: issue #5 §5.3, §10 decision 5; enrich.md

Context

The reference implementation measures a bundle's maturity as percentages against denominators it has to invent. Denominators produce two problems at once: a ceiling — once a volume reads 100 % there is nothing left to earn, so adding good data cannot be rewarded — and arithmetic that can be wrong, which is exactly the known DescribedPct above 100 % defect.

Decision

The score is per feature, additive, unbounded, and monotone. Each feature earns points for a quality it verifiably has: a name; prose past a substance threshold; resolved geo coordinates; a membership attribute; a resolved icon on its collection; geometry substance, log-scaled; cross-source corroboration from the merge ledger. Collections earn for declared conventions, worlds for geometry declarations and lens depth, and scores sum upward to the volume.

No denominators, no ceilings. Percentages survive only as diagnostics.

Monotonicity is a build gate: an enrichment build whose score declines fails. The gate compares under the same scoring-table version — a re-weighting is a new version, not a mass failure — and a decrease that comes from removing data that was wrong is ledgered and permitted.

Consequences

  • The DescribedPct defect is retired by construction rather than fixed.
  • The five absolute measurement axes and the whole merge-ledger reporting carry over as the score's breakdown, so nothing that was measurable stops being measurable.
  • The scoring table is versioned data. Changing a weight is a visible decision with a version number, not a silent re-baseline.
  • The workbench headlines score deltas between builds: "what did this enrichment actually add" is a number the pipeline already computed.
  • The gate rewards good data and never punishes corrections, which is the ethic it exists to encode.