Research Topics

A Research Topic is the unit of research work in an Isomer Project. It owns the topic intent, topic overview, workspace runtime, records, repositories, actor and agent workspaces, and GUI-readable artifacts.

Create a topic with the CLI:

isomer-cli project topics create my-topic \
  --statement "Investigate the concrete research question." \
  --set-default

Topic intent files such as intent/src/topic-overview.md are part of the topic contract. If they are missing, the Topic Workspace is incomplete and validation or GUI diagnostics should report that directly.

New topic overviews include a Guiding Questions table with exactly Priority, Survey Question, and Value columns. The Topic Creator generates as many distinct answerable questions as the topic supports rather than enforcing a fixed count. Priorities are unique contiguous positive integers starting at 1, and each Value is one concise rationale without separate research and engineering labels.

Overview questions are candidate topic intent. A survey extension such as Kaoju must apply its normal review boundary before accepting them into a Survey Contract, and the rows do not automatically become Research Inquiries, Research Ideas, or survey directions. Value can guide attention and explain priority, but it is not evidence or a conclusion.

Existing overviews remain user-authored state. If an overview has no Guiding Questions table or uses the legacy Research Value and Engineering Value split, automatic creation and create-missing workflows preserve it and report format drift. Reconcile it explicitly through research-intent clarification or a requested migration.

Use Topic Workspaces for the filesystem contract and Research Records for artifact indexing.