Business rules

Rules the business has set for the Digital File Library (DFL) and the AI Classifier Tool (AICT). This page is a requirements catalogue, not a description of DEMI as it runs. Do not cite a rule here as evidence of how the code behaves.

What the code enforces

Only BR-04 has a counterpart in src/. It ships as the read[] ACL: a record is public only when its read[] contains public, and chunk visibility is derived from the parent document at query time. Architecture describes the mechanism and ADR-004-Read-ACL-Authorization-Model the decision behind it.

Everything else on this page is unimplemented. Two fields exist but do not do what the rules describe: orcsClassification (src/seed/transform.js:146) and legislation (src/seed/transform.js:148) are copied verbatim from Eagle, not derived. DEMI has three access tiers — privileged, scoped, public — not the five levels of BR-03.

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1. Document lifecycle and admission

BR-01: Metadata verification hold

• Rule: All newly uploaded or migrated documents, from EPIC.submit or an automated EDRMS pipeline, must immediately enter a metadata verification hold state.
• Constraint: During the hold the file is staged in object storage but is not admitted as an official DFL file-of-record. It stays invisible and unsearchable except to the uploader or a SuperUser.
• Admission trigger: A document is admitted, becoming a file-of-record, only when an authorized operator or SuperUser reviews, corrects and confirms its metadata.

BR-02: Coarse-grain vein tagging

• Rule: On upload, every file must receive a coarse, reversible two-letter "vein" classification handle appended as a filename suffix, for example <original name> -[VV] -P.json, where -P means pending verification.
• Vein spectrum:
  • PT — project technical detail (bulk studies, baseline reports, plans)
  • CP — certificate proper (the legally issued certificate itself)
  • PE — public engagement (public comments, PCP advertisements)
  • AT — Act transition (requests, cross-Act notifications)
  • OA — official EA artifacts (orders, amendments, evaluations)
  • CM — communication (general correspondence, letters)

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2. Security and visibility gating

BR-03: Sensitivity ladder (0–4)

Document security and authorization levels must align with a 0–4 sensitivity scale:

Level	Classification	Audience
0	Uploader only	The uploading account or service alone
1	Project team	The designated EAO project team list
2	EAO-wide	All internal EAO staff (IDIR holders)
3	TAC / working group	Technical Advisory Committee and working groups
4	Government-wide	All BC government staff with a valid IDIR

BR-04: Public visibility double-gating

• Rule: For a DFL document to be searchable or viewable by the public it must pass two checks: the document itself is published, and its parent project is published.
• Enforcement: The document's read[] must contain public, and a project visibility change cascades into its documents' read[] by intersection, so a document cannot out-rank its parent. Publishing a document under an unpublished project is refused with 409. Every search a caller makes carries that caller's read[] predicate, evaluated by Azure AI Search alongside the match. Chunks are gated by their parent document, resolved at query time.

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3. Ingestion and classification (AICT heuristics)

BR-05: The grazing pre-pass (volume exclusion)

• Rule: High-volume technical project documentation — baseline studies, raw appendices, environmental chapters, about 76% of files — must be identified and set aside in a preliminary "grazing" pre-pass.
• Action: These documents are flagged Project Content = YES and skip deep taxonomy and keyword-frequency analysis.
• Objective: Preserve throughput and prevent resource exhaustion during bulk ingestion.

BR-06: Deterministic document type to ORCS mapping

• Rule: Records-management fields must use a deterministic mapping so the result is auditable and explainable:
  1. AICT uses keyword score thresholds to suggest a document type — "environmental assessment certificate" suggests EAC.
  2. The confirmed document type maps one-to-one to an official ORCS classification code, defined by GIMO.
  3. The ORCS code dictates the retention class and disposal schedule.
• Mapping:
  • EAC (certificate) → ORCS 15400-30 → permanent archiving
  • AR (assessment report) → ORCS 15400-20 → 7 years semi-active retention, then archive
  • Process Order → ORCS 15400-40 → active life of project

BR-07: AI explainability mandate

• Rule: The AICT interface must present the rule, score weights or keyword hits — for example "matched term 'environmental assessment certificate' 4 times" — alongside any suggestion.
• Consent rule: Autonomous final assignment of ORCS codes is forbidden. A human supervisor must confirm before records-management tags are committed.

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4. Multi-Act compliance and timelines

BR-08: Operative Act recovery

• Rule: The system must evaluate a document's creation or publication date against regulatory transition milestones to assign the correct operative Act — the 1996, 2002 or 2018 EAA.
• Transition threshold: Documents on or after the Process Order milestone — 2021-04-16 for Cariboo Gold — default to the 2018 Act; earlier documents operate under the 2002 Act.

BR-09: Project-level Act transition assembly

• Rule: An individual document stays tagged under a single operative Act.
• Action: Where a project spans multiple Acts, detected through transition documents such as a "Section 10 Order" paired with a "Section 19 Order", AICT compiles a project-level transition timeline block rather than duplicating Act fields on every document.

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Related

EPIC-Search-Business-Rules lists where DEMI's rules differ from EAO's other search product, EPIC.search.