Defines questions, fields, meanings, calculations, scope, interpretation, and user-visible evidence for dashboard composition, so adopters can compose a requested analysis into a coherent dashboard of KPIs, comparisons, charts, breakdowns, explanations, and...
Package status: reference context ready for human review. The contract and test scenarios are complete, but no claim is made that an adopting implementation has passed them.
Decision
For Dashboard composition, define the semantic measurement contract so adopters can compose a requested analysis into a coherent dashboard of KPIs, comparisons, charts, breakdowns, explanations, and visible data-quality states. Composition arranges validated analytical results; it may not recompute metrics independently or hide incompatible scopes behind a common layout. This is a reference contract: database products, numeric budgets, jurisdictions, retention, organizational defaults, and accountable owners remain explicit adoption choices.
Scope
- The Dashboard composition actors, inputs, outputs, states, versions, and externally visible outcomes needed to compose a requested analysis into a coherent dashboard of KPIs, comparisons, charts, breakdowns, explanations, and visible data-quality states.
- The role-specific focus of this block: define the semantic measurement contract, including primary, cached, asynchronous, export, support, and recovery paths where applicable.
- Adoption-specific configuration, ownership, rollout, evidence retention, and review responsibilities needed to use the contract safely.
Outside this block
- Composition arranges validated analytical results; it may not recompute metrics independently or hide incompatible scopes behind a common layout.
- Choosing a universal database, model, renderer, vendor, numeric threshold, retention period, timezone, jurisdiction, or service-level objective.
- Claiming that packaged scenarios ran against a downstream implementation or that this reference grants security, privacy, accessibility, analytical, or legal approval.
Contract
- The declared Dashboard composition contract requires this rule: A dashboard starts from one stated decision question and includes only cards whose metric, scope, interval, grain, and comparison contribute to that question.
- The declared Dashboard composition contract requires this rule: Each KPI shows display name, value, unit, comparison delta, exact period, freshness, and immediate access to its plain-language definition.
- The declared Dashboard composition contract requires this rule: Charts and breakdowns reference validated result IDs; cross-filters create new governed queries rather than filtering an unauthorized superset in the browser.
- The declared Dashboard composition contract requires this rule: The composition distinguishes loading, partial, stale, empty, invalid, unavailable, and denied states at both dashboard and card level.
- The declared Dashboard composition contract requires this rule: Executive summary, chart titles, legends, annotations, data tables, and exported files share the same metric names and comparison object.
- The declared Dashboard composition contract requires this rule: Role-specific layouts may change emphasis but never broaden subject scope, dimensions, row access, export rights, or minimum-population rules.
- The declared Dashboard composition contract requires this rule: A stable dashboard document can be bookmarked, shared, or regenerated with policy re-evaluation and explicit version migration.
- The declared Dashboard composition contract requires this rule: The first view remains concise while metric definitions, methodology, provenance, and caveats are available without requiring analytics expertise.
Implementation guidance
- Begin with the business question and the decisions it informs, then specify semantic fields before choosing storage or visualization technology.
- Review terminology with a domain owner, a data owner, and representative non-specialist users before marking the definition active.
- Version every meaning-bearing field and retain a fixture that can be recalculated independently of the implementation.
- Map each displayed or spoken claim to the exact semantic field that supplies it.
Failure handling and safeguards
- For Dashboard composition, If one required card is invalid or access-trimmed, the dashboard labels its affected scope and never substitutes a superficially similar metric.
- For Dashboard composition, If sections resolve to different timezones, populations, or metric versions, composition fails until the mismatch is reconciled or made explicitly separate.
- For Dashboard composition, A saved dashboard that no longer passes current authorization returns a denied or reduced view without leaking prior cached values.
Verification and operations
- For the analytics evidence of Dashboard composition, trace every dashboard element to its result and definition, and verify that filters and periods remain synchronized across views and exports.
- For the analytics evidence of Dashboard composition, exercise role changes, revoked access, stale caches, empty datasets, partial ingestion, and failed chart rendering against saved dashboards.
- For the analytics evidence of Dashboard composition, run comprehension and accessibility review with executives, account managers, analysts, keyboard users, and narrow-screen layouts.
Adoption assumptions
- The adopting product has authenticated identity, a versioned authorization policy, owned metric definitions, bounded telemetry, and a controlled path for change.
- Names and values in the example are fictional adoption fixtures, not universal defaults, production credentials, performance promises, or business targets.
- Referenced specifications constrain protocol, security, accessibility, or vendor behavior; the adopting team must confirm current applicability before promotion.
The executable-looking examples in this package are fixtures and acceptance contracts. Run the collection validator to check structure and metadata, then translate and execute the scenarios in the target repository before recording implementation evidence.
References
- W3C WAI, Complex Images tutorial (applies as of 2026-09-12)
- W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2