Data Integrity · STRUCK
Hand over an output that can be checked, not just accepted.
An output is the point where accumulated work becomes something a person acts on. Everything before it is process; everything after it is consequence. The failure STRUCK addresses is not the false output. It is the output that is entirely accurate and structurally unusable: it states a conclusion without saying what would overturn it, averages away the disagreement its sources held, and arrives with a confidence cannot be audited from the output itself. STRUCK is CRAFT’s companion standard at the exit boundary. It sets out what an evidence-grade output must carry on its face, so whoever receives it, a person or an automated system, can do more than take it or leave it.
Support, Traced, Refutation, Unjudged, Contest, Known
The six things an output has to carry on its face.
STRUCK specifies obligations, not implementations. It binds no one to any tool or format, and an output produced entirely by hand can satisfy it as fully as one produced by a pipeline.
Support graded
The output exposes the grade profile of its support, per dimension, down to the weakest source in it, and never collapses it into a single combined confidence figure that cannot be audited from the output.
Traced to origin
Every rung of support is walked to its ultimate origin and labeled for what it is, with stopping points declared where the walk cannot continue. A review presented as the study, or an aggregator as the registry, fails here.
Refutation stated
The output states what would overturn it, in terms of what could be found in the world, not in terms of its own internal process. A claim that nothing could show wrong is not an output; it is a commitment.
Unjudged worth
The judgment of sufficiency stays with whoever acts on the output, human or automated. STRUCK reports what the support is; whether that suffices depends on what is being decided, which the producer generally does not know.
Contest kept
Where the support disagrees, the disagreement is kept rather than resolved into a mean no source asserts. An average across a real dispute is precise, durable, and about nothing.
Known on its face
Conformance is assessable from the output alone. It carries the five obligations above, or explicitly declares and justifies the absence of any that does not apply; the declaration is itself conformant, and silence is not.
The core move
Certify the material, not what you do with it.
STRUCK certifies that an output met its prestated intended use. It does not assess workmanship, and it does not decide whether the output is good enough for what you are about to do with it: it certifies the quality of the silver, not the spoon you make from it. That is the line that keeps it from obstructing; a conformance check adds no quality bar that would block a sound output from leaving.
An output whose support is thin is not thereby a weak output; it is an output whose consumer can see what is being trusted. An output that fails any of the six is not thereby false; it is an output its consumer cannot check, which is a different and more durable problem.
Where it sits
CRAFT covers the chain. STRUCK covers what leaves it.
A chain of evaluation can be sound at every step, but once the output leaves the chain, whoever acts on it, a person or a system, holds an assertion from a certified process, not the material to check it. STRUCK makes the output carry its own quality on the way out, so it travels as certified material rather than the certified process’s say-so.
STRUCK and ORE are one handoff seen from two sides: STRUCK is what an upstream chain owes on the way out, ORE is what a downstream chain may assume on the way in. STRUCK is independently adoptable: taking it requires taking nothing else, and it does not require CRAFT.
The condition map, in one view