ADR-A87: Eligibility concept inclusion and exclusion

Status: Accepted Date: 2026-09-25 (proposed), 2026-09-25 (accepted) Related: ADR-A03 (condition taxonomy), ADR-A06 (wildcard semantics), ADR-A85 (scoped and temporal binding resolution), ADR-A86 (ontology semantic versioning) Unit: applied-ontology-readiness

Context

ADR-A03 gives every condition a match strategy, but until commit 9a12da4 Eligibility had no property naming the concepts an ExactMatch, SetMembership or HierarchicalMatch condition matches against, and no way to state an exception. Applied ontologies need both. A clinical-trial protocol admits “any solid tumour except those of the central nervous system”. An employment policy grants a benefit to “every job family except contractor grades”. Neither can be written as a union of ranges, which is how IntervalContainment already expresses gaps.

Commit 9a12da4 added elg:requiredConcept, elg:excludedConcept, the elg:StaticConstraint law register, laws L10 to L13, two warning shapes and a decision table in ontology/eligibility/README.md §4. It landed without an ADR. This ADR records the decision so it can be ratified or amended, and corrects one defect found since.

Decision

1. A condition matching by ExactMatch, SetMembership or HierarchicalMatch states its concepts with elg:requiredConcept and elg:excludedConcept. Several required concepts are alternatives. Each excluded concept excludes independently. Match is equality for the first two strategies and “at or below, in the bound scheme’s ordering” for HierarchicalMatch, with the scheme resolved under ADR-A85.
2. Decisions follow the README §4 table: exclusion takes precedence (L10), a candidate strictly above an excluded concept is Undetermined (L11), and a condition with exclusions only admits every other member of its bound scheme (L12).
3. An exclusion that falls inside no inclusion excludes nothing and is reported as a warning (L13, elg:ReachableExclusionShape).
4. A concept-matching condition that declares no concept is reported as a warning (elg:ConceptConditionDeclarationShape). This warning applies to conditions that match candidates directly. It does not apply to an elg:AdmissionProfile, which ADR-A03 makes a condition but whose concepts belong to the conditions it composes. The shape as committed in 9a12da4 also fires on profiles. Excluding a focus node that has elg:hasCondition corrects it.
5. Both shapes are sh:Warning. A graph that conformed before 9a12da4 still conforms.

Consequences

• The 9a12da4 change is MINOR under ADR-A86, as recorded in that commit. The profile correction in item 4 is a PATCH to eligibility/spec (a shape brought into line with documented intent), with the import cascade the policy requires.
• Eligibility’s own examples must declare concepts on their concept-matching conditions, or they demonstrate a warning. The examples are patched in the unit’s slice AOR-2, each with a comment naming the warning that removing the concept would raise.
• No backend compiles these semantics yet. ADR-A89 proposes the compiled form.
• Questions have no concept-valued candidate property. elg:candidateValue ranges over qnt:Value. ADR-A89 addresses this.