Portability and Longevity

A research space may outlive its current software stack.

QLens therefore favors open, inspectable, text-friendly formats and explicit contracts. The repository should remain recoverable without a proprietary service. Derived indexes and interfaces should be rebuildable from canonical content.

Longevity also requires semantic versioning of contracts and migrations that preserve identity and history. A future implementation may change nearly everything about storage or display, but it must be able to explain what happened to every canonical object.