Meridian/VAsset Data Validation
Pre-pilot
Manifesto · v1

What we built, why it exists, and how it works.

Meridian/V is a deliberate piece of infrastructure. This page exists so that anyone — engineer, authority, auditor — can read the whole rationale in one sitting before they decide whether to trust a certificate we issued.

What it is

A pipeline, a workflow, a certificate authority.

Meridian/V is four things stitched together, in this order. Each one is necessary; none on its own is sufficient.

01Layer

A validation pipeline

For the COTO TMH-18 (Road Asset Data Electronic Exchange Formats) specification — structural and domain rules over UTF-8 CSV submissions.

02Layer

A co-sign workflow

A submitting engineer prepares the dataset; a principal engineer co-signs. Separation of duty is enforced — no signer approves their own submission.

03Layer

A certificate authority

On co-sign, Meridian/V hashes the stored file bytes (SHA-256) and issues a public certificate at tmh18.com/verify — re-hashable by any third party without an account.

04Layer

An immutable audit log

Every override, every reviewer comment, every co-sign event is written to an append-only audit log keyed to the submission ID.

MERIDIAN/V · /MANIFESTOSIGNAL · TMH-18 v5∞ ITERATIONPAPER → CERTIFICATE
Why it exists

Road-asset data is the spine of every pavement decision.

If the spine is bent — bad encoding, missing temperature correction, a chainage that runs backwards — every downstream model lies with confidence. Meridian/V is the X-ray.

Why · first principles

Four claims we are willing to be measured against.

Every product decision — what to build, what to refuse to build — comes back to these. If one of them turns out to be wrong, the platform is wrong.

§1Principle

Trust must be reproducible.

A PDF stamp is a claim. A SHA-256 over the exact bytes a co-signing engineer reviewed is a fact. Anyone — a contractor, an auditor, a court — can re-derive it in seconds.

§2Principle

Standards deserve enforcement.

TMH-18 is a published spec. Submissions that drift from it — bad encoding, non-monotonic chainage, missing temperature correction — should not silently pass into the asset record. The engine makes the spec executable.

§3Principle

Overrides are not loopholes.

A warning override is recorded with the engineer who issued it, the justification, and the timestamp. The certificate carries the full context, not a stripped pass/fail.

§4Principle

The verifier is the product.

The platform is incidental. The third-party verifier — open, no account required, cryptographic — is what makes the certificate worth anything outside our walls.

How it works

Four deterministic steps from raw CSV to a third-party-verifiable hash.

Nothing on this path is a black box. The rule set is published, the override justifications are written to the audit log, and the certificate is verifiable without an account on tmh18.com/verify.

01Step

Submit

Upload the TMH-18 dataset (UTF-8 CSV, up to 50 MB). The ingest schema maps headers — ROAD_NUMBER, SECTION_ID, CHAINAGE, DATE, D0, D200 — to the canonical field set defined in the documentation.

02Step

Validate

The rule engine runs deterministic checks on every row — encoding, required headers, monotonic chainage, deflection-sensor ratio, temperature correction. Warnings can be overridden with a written justification; errors block the co-sign request.

03Step

Co-sign

The submitting engineer requests a co-sign. A principal engineer at the same organisation reviews the overrides, validates the dataset against site context, and signs. The signing event is locked to the file bytes at that moment.

04Step

Certify

Meridian/V hashes the bytes (SHA-256), mints a certificate, and publishes it at tmh18.com/verify. Any third party can re-hash their copy of the file and match the certified hash — no login, no API key.

Full rule catalogue, header reference, and verifier semantics: /docs.

Pre-pilot intake

Read the principles.
Then submit something.

Pre-pilot access is reviewed by hand. Apply on the request-access page — we respond within 48 hours with a decision and a one-time admin invite for accepted organisations.

Request access

Application takes about 2 minutes. No payment required during pilot.