This page describes the shape of the pilot. The step-by-step procedure is published in full on semanticdatacharter.com, across six pages: prerequisites, picking components, the on-ramps, the audit period, and reading the results. No account is needed to read any of it, and nothing there is behind a form.
The procurement frame
For an organization locked to a platform it cannot easily leave, the hardest question is where to begin. The answer is not a migration.
The most common objection to adopting SDC is not technical and is not pricing. It is the fear of a six-month commitment that ends in a disrupted production system with nothing to show for it.
Both halves of that fear are misplaced. The smallest viable SDC pilot takes thirty days, runs in parallel with production, and produces a deliverable a board can read.
- No vendor lock-in.
sdcgovernanceis Apache-2.0 on PyPI and runs anywhere Python runs. - No data migration. The audit observes the decision flow you already have.
- No system replacement. It runs alongside production, not in it.
What the pilot actually does
- Set up the substrate. In SDCStudio, pick a domain library (NIEM, FHIR, NIH CDE or Default), layer the ProvGov components on top, point an agent at one datasource, and get validated SDC4 instances. One to two days for most pilots.
- Install sdcgovernance.
pip install sdcgovernance, then configure the decision table that mirrors the rules your flow already follows. - Observe for thirty days. Every decision in the flow generates a tamper-evident receipt, hash-chained and bound to the SDC instance that produced it. Read-only against your existing system.
- Read the corpus. Three questions: was provenance complete, where were the gaps, and what would have been refused. You exit with documented governance or with a specific, scoped Phase 2.
Why this works as a pilot
Zero production impact
sdcgovernance runs alongside, not in. Receipts are observational, and nothing
the existing system does changes.
Defined exit criteria
At day thirty you have a receipt corpus. The exit is empirical, not narrative.
Procurement-defensible
No lock-in, no migration, no replacement. Because sdcgovernance is
Apache-2.0, there is no licence or contract with Axius SDC required to run the pilot at
all. The only two costs are a minimal SDCStudio account (typically under 20,000 credits,
$20 worth) and your own team's time.
Auditable artefact
The receipt corpus is board-readable: hash-chained, structurally consistent and portable.
What you walk away with
Two things, both yours to keep.
The receipt corpus. A hash-chained, portable record answering what your governance actually did over the thirty days, in a form a board or an auditor can read.
The generated app stack. At the end of the on-ramp you download the composed data model, a template SDC4 instance, and an Apache-2.0 app stack scaffolded for the profile you pick: a fully FOSS profile (Apache Jena/Fuseki with PostgreSQL), an enterprise profile (Graphwise GraphDB with SirixDB and Keycloak), or both.
Why the stack matters beyond this pilot
Every later app you generate imports into the original stack, so infrastructure is procured once across the portfolio rather than once per pilot.