`dossier/` — research state as data. **A probe, not a department.**

An experiment: can intent, definitions, provenance, evidence, failed attempts, proof obligations and verification status be represented so that an agent can perform and resume rigorous mathematical work?

One schema, one worked example (Hardy's Z), one CLI. Read docs/19-research-dossiers.md for the design and for §6, which explains why this is deliberately not a department.

.venv/bin/python scripts/50_dossier.py                # list
.venv/bin/python scripts/50_dossier.py hardy_Z        # the full report
.venv/bin/python scripts/50_dossier.py --validate     # non-zero exit if malformed

Why it is a probe

harness/README.md's admission rule is no department without a battery, and a battery needs rivals — things that share the claimed structure and lack the property. A dossier has no rivals of its own: refuting the |ζ(½+it)| candidate is a claim about ζ, adjudicated by the zeta department's subject matter. A department whose battery is another department's battery is not a department.

So this registers nowhere, has no door, and appears in no department table. The rule was not weakened to let it in. §6 of doc 19 records what would have to change.

The two ideas being tested

Intent is data. Intent.purpose says what the object is for, in prose, before any formula; distinguishes_from lists what it is most likely to be confused with. The Hardy Z dossier lists five, four of them name collisions already documented in AGENTS.md. A definition can be checked against a formula — an intent can only be stated, and stating it is what makes a later mismatch visible.

"Verified" is four things. status.py carries four independent axes:

There is no aggregate. Support.__bool__ raises, so if support: is an error rather than a silent collapse. That is the module's whole job.

What the schema refuses

• no intent — a formula with no way to tell if it is the right formula;
• no discriminating obligation — a check nothing plausible fails is a tautology;
• an axis asserting support with no artifact — decoration;
• a rejected alternative with no reason, or an open question with no what_would_settle_it.

The seam

schema.py, status.py, report.py and __init__.py name no quantity any laboratory computes and import nothing from one — AST scan, clean-interpreter sys.modules check, and a lexical scan, the same three the other seams use. Subject matter lives in subjects/.

The lexical scan caught the first draft of these very modules, which cited zeta/rigor.py by name in a docstring. That is the seam working.

Reuse, not reinvention

Provenance comes from ontology.schema. No ledger, no verdict vocabulary, and no second notion of provenance is defined here — a dossier describes one object's research state; it is not a candidate observation with a hit rate, and ontology/ already owns that.

Identity is the one thing not reused: ontology.schema.content_hash canonicalises a claim, demands a candidate kind and prefixes ids with cand-. A dossier is not a candidate, and an id reading cand- would be read as one — so dossier_id hashes its own three fields under doss-.

No certificate is ever issued here. "Certified" is reserved (AGENTS.md); a dossier records that one was obtained and points at it.

Scope

Bookkeeping about a textbook function. Nothing here is evidence for RH.