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docs/RC_SCOPE_FREEZE_BELGIUM_NORTH_SEA.md

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+# RC Scope Freeze: Belgium and the Belgian North Sea
+
+## Status and precedence
+
+This document freezes the geographic and release scope for the GeoIntel
+release-candidate program. It supersedes the geographic limitation in
+`docs/V1_SCOPE_FREEZE.md`. The existing V1 domain, persistence, provenance,
+GIS-correctness and no-fake-data rules remain in force.
+
+Mol and the Kempen remain golden regression areas. They are no longer the
+product boundary.
+
+## Product identity
+
+GeoIntel RC is a map-first geospatial analysis workbench for:
+
+- the complete land territory of Belgium;
+- the Belgian territorial sea;
+- the Belgian exclusive economic zone and continental shelf, labelled
+  according to their legal meaning;
+- bounded user-drawn areas that may cross municipal, provincial, regional or
+  land/sea boundaries.
+
+The primary flow remains:
+
+1. open the map;
+2. choose one or more understandable themes;
+3. draw or select an area;
+4. load only the authoritative or explicitly contextual data available for
+   that area;
+5. calculate source-appropriate metrics;
+6. inspect provenance, limitations and time;
+7. compare compatible historical editions;
+8. export the result or ask the local assistant about persisted evidence.
+
+## Geographic federation
+
+Belgian coverage is a federation of governed adapters. GeoIntel must never
+pretend that regional datasets have identical semantics merely because they
+can be displayed together.
+
+| Zone | Baseline authority | Detailed authoritative families |
+| --- | --- | --- |
+| Belgium-wide | NGI/IGN, Statbel, federal geo.be | AdminVector, Top10Vector/CartoWeb, statistical sectors and population |
+| Flanders | Digitaal Vlaanderen and competent Flemish agencies | GRB, orthophotos, DHMV, VMM/VHA, DOV, INBO, ALZ |
+| Wallonia | Service public de Wallonie | PICC, SPW orthophotos, relief, hydrography, land cover and thematic catalogues |
+| Brussels | Brussels Capital Region/Paradigm and competent administrations | UrbIS, BruGIS and Brussels open geodata |
+| Belgian North Sea | federal Marine Environment, RBINS/BMDC, MDK and legally competent publishers | maritime plan and zones, marine environment, hydrography and validated bathymetry |
+
+NGI Top10Vector is the preferred common topographic baseline candidate when
+its machine access, licence, edition and bounded retrieval contract have been
+validated. Regional large-scale products remain preferred where their
+authority and semantic detail are higher.
+
+## Required RC coverage
+
+The RC must provide:
+
+- a persisted authoritative Belgium land boundary;
+- persisted and legally labelled maritime scope boundaries;
+- area selection anywhere inside the combined Belgium/maritime scope;
+- a coverage matrix that reports every theme as `operational`, `partial`,
+  `not_configured` or `unsupported` for the selected zone;
+- source, authority, observation time, publication time, CRS, licence,
+  attribution, coverage and limitation metadata for every result;
+- bounded acquisition and analysis; no browser-side source fetch and no
+  unbounded country-wide request to a public service;
+- compatible historical comparison only where editions, units, coverage and
+  methods are comparable;
+- a stable national theme vocabulary while preserving provider-native fields
+  and semantics.
+
+The minimum common theme vocabulary is:
+
+- administrative context;
+- buildings and built environment;
+- roads and mobility context;
+- surface water and hydrography;
+- land cover and land use;
+- vegetation, forest and nature;
+- population and statistical context;
+- elevation and terrain;
+- orthophoto/aerial imagery;
+- flood or climate context where authoritative data exists;
+- maritime planning, marine environment and bathymetry for the Belgian North
+  Sea where authoritative data exists.
+
+Not every theme must have the same resolution or historical depth in every
+zone. Absence or partial coverage must be visible and must not be replaced by
+fabricated values.
+
+## Golden release areas
+
+National support is validated through bounded golden areas, not one monolithic
+import:
+
+- Mol municipality: existing deep land and AI regression reference;
+- Kempen transport region: existing cross-municipality and partition test;
+- one Walloon urban/rural boundary-crossing area;
+- one Brussels urban area;
+- one cross-region or language-boundary area;
+- one coastal land/sea area;
+- one Belgian North Sea area containing at least two legal/use zones.
+
+Exact golden area identifiers and checksums must be stored in release
+evidence. A source is not nationally operational merely because the Mol test
+passes.
+
+## Maritime and bathymetry rules
+
+- Territorial sea, EEZ and continental shelf are separate legal scopes.
+- TAW, LAT, mDNG, NAP and product-specific vertical references remain
+  separate dimensions.
+- No value is transformed between vertical datums without an authoritative,
+  tested transformation and an uncertainty statement.
+- Bathymetry is bed elevation or depth relative to a stated reference plane.
+  It is not water volume.
+- Water volume requires compatible bed elevation, water-surface elevation,
+  time, coverage and uncertainty contracts.
+- WMTS/WMS imagery may provide visual context but is not an analytical raster
+  unless pixel values and georeferencing are governed and validated.
+
+## Explicit exclusions from this RC
+
+- automatic whole-country mirroring of every source;
+- bypassing TLS, licence or source-integrity failures;
+- claiming semantic parity between GRB, PICC, UrbIS and NGI products;
+- hidden external downloads at application startup;
+- browser-direct provider access;
+- production multi-user authentication;
+- real-time surveillance or operational maritime navigation;
+- unsupported water-volume estimates;
+- a separate RC-12 soak phase.
+
+Fresh-install, upgrade, rollback and runtime-stability evidence are mandatory
+but are incorporated into RC-5 and RC-11.
+
+## Scope change control
+
+During the RC program, a scope change is allowed only when it:
+
+1. fixes a release blocker;
+2. adds missing coverage required by this document;
+3. corrects source authority, provenance, CRS, time or metric semantics; or
+4. improves verification without adding unrelated product capability.
+
+Every accepted change must update the autonomous roadmap, execution log and
+relevant source/API documentation.