How to import an existing corpus

The harness can import an existing research corpus — and, above all, its knowledge graph — into a freshly instantiated harness, with provenance and graph edges intact (design spec §10). This is the first real use of the MIF substrate: because a corpus is already MIF (findings are MIF concept units, the graph is MIF EntityReferences and typed relationships), the import is lossless.

This runs against your own instantiated harness, never against the template. The template ships clean and standalone; a corpus only ever lands in an instance’s reports/. Importing the prior corpus into the template would defeat the point of a clean, reusable template.

What you need

A source corpus directory containing:

findings/*.json — the MIF concept units (each must validate against schemas/findings.schema.json and carry a provenance block).
optionally knowledge-graph.json — the corpus’s existing graph, used to confirm the edge set survives the import.

Import

From your instantiated harness:

scripts/import-corpus.sh <source-corpus-dir> <topic-id>

This validates every finding against the MIF-backed schema (refusing to import anything that fails), copies them under reports/<topic-id>/findings/, registers the topic in your harness.config.json, and rebuilds the index and graph over the imported substrate. The W3C-PROV provenance block travels with each unit untouched.

Verify the import

The build gate’s import check (gate_m8 in scripts/verify.sh) asserts, against a sample corpus, that the imported finding count, graph node count, and graph edge count all match the source, that provenance is preserved on every finding, and that the rebuilt graph still derives from urn:mif: ids — proving the edges survive. Run scripts/assert-graph-mif.sh reports/<topic-id>/knowledge-graph.json on your own import to confirm the same.

Internal and document sources (feature-flagged)

Some findings cite internal documents (ADRs, named reports) with no web URL, carried as first-class internal citations (citationType: "internal:document", the quote in note). The citation-integrity gate accepts them only when the instance opts in via harness.config.json:

{ "features": { "internalCitations": true } }

internalCitations defaults to false — the template ships strict (http(s)-only citations). Enable it in an instance whose corpus carries internal sources; leave it off to keep the strict default.

What is not carried

The legacy v1→v2 migrate skill is intentionally dropped (design spec §4a): a one-time migration shim has no role in a greenfield template. Bringing an existing corpus forward is done by the import path — a clean MIF-to-MIF import — not by a migration of legacy in-place state.