- Capability purpose
- Help the owner identify possible feeds, APIs, sitemaps, release channels, services, archives, or other origins before deciding whether any source should be registered or accessed.
- Meaningful outcome
- A discovery attempt produces zero or more candidate records with submitted subject, candidate type/location, confidence, update expectation, security/authentication state, terms or robots notes, likely cost, actor, method, and time.
- Boundaries — includes
- submitted domain/page/organization/service, candidate probing within allowed discovery scope, candidate type, location/reference, confidence, expected update frequency, authentication need, security state, public-policy notes, likely cost, duplicate handling, and discovery provenance.
- Boundaries — excludes
- collecting source content, registering a connector, authenticating to the source, authorizing backfill or ongoing collection, importing data, accepting terms, and treating a candidate as endorsed or trusted.
- Terms and concepts
- A candidate may identify a
schema.org/DataFeed, schema.org/WebAPI, schema.org/Dataset, website, archive, service, or other origin. Candidate identity remains provisional until governed review and registration.
- Actor
- The owner or an authorized source-discovery process.
- Command / intent
- Inspect a declared subject or location for potential information sources without collecting their substantive content.
- Current state
- The submitted subject/location, allowed inspection scope, actor identity, network and policy boundary, and existing candidate/source records can be determined.
- Policies / invariants
- Discovery never grants collection authority; authentication is not attempted without separate authority; terms, robots and security observations remain notes rather than legal conclusions; confidence and method are visible; duplicates link to prior candidates; no candidate becomes registered automatically.
- Transition
- Perform the permitted inspection, normalize and deduplicate candidate findings, and persist the discovery result and evidence.
- Result
- A set of reviewable source candidates, no candidates found, or a reasoned blocked/failed discovery result.
- Events / effects
- May initiate a structured candidate review, permission review, source registration proposal, cost estimate, or owner-attention item through separate capabilities.
- Unknowns
- Universal inspection depth, robots/terms interpretation, active probing, rate limits and candidate expiry are not established.