# 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.