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Roadmap

Delivered

Phase Capability
0 Foundation: development log and four ADRs
1 Packaging, tooling, CI across Python 3.11–3.13
2 Canonical in-memory data model
3 Generic CSV/TSV ingestion and the parser registry
4 Validation tiers, analysis readiness, structured summaries
5 Basic scan plotting
6 AUCX archival container, source checksums
7 Command-line interface
8 Alpha-release readiness at 0.1.0a1
Deterministic synthetic-data generator
This documentation site
9 Release mechanics: coverage gate, release-check and artifact-verification scripts, a publish-free release dry-run workflow, and a written release checklist
10 First public alpha: v0.1.0a1 tagged, published as a GitHub pre-release, and uploaded to PyPI over Trusted Publishing

Release-hardening follow-ups after Phase 9 — such as isolating the artifact verifier's unit tests from the repository's mutable dist/ — are corrections to that machinery, not a new phase.

Open questions

Seven were raised at the outset. All seven are resolved:

Question Status
Q1 — In-archive data encoding Resolved: NumPy .npy (ADR-0003)
Q2 — Canonical units Resolved: fixed, retained, never converted (ADR-0002)
Q3 — Minimum valid-experiment metadata Resolved: construction invariants plus unambiguous keying (ADR-0002)
Q4 — Optical systems in v1 Resolved: five represented (ADR-0002)
Q5 — Provenance schema and checksum algorithm Resolved: SHA-256, per-source entries (ADR-0003)
Q6 — Documentation tooling Resolved: MkDocs Material — this site
Q7 — CLI command surface Resolved: six commands with documented exit codes

Next milestone

None is committed. The first public alpha has been taken — 0.1.0a1 is tagged, released and on PyPI — and no successor version has been selected, scheduled or promised. What comes next will be chosen from the candidates below, and this section will say so once it is.

Candidates, not commitments

  • Vendor-format readers. Each needs a documented, non-reverse-engineered specification before any parsing code is written. See Scientific boundaries.
  • Sample-to-scan linkage (sample_id on ScanMetadata).
  • Heterogeneous per-scan signal units.
  • An acquired_at field in the manifest schema.
  • Third-party parser discovery through entry points.

Never

Scientific analysis, quality control, unit conversion and physical simulation are permanent non-goals, not deferred work.

Next step