Proposat

Proposat is a theoretical framework and, in some implementations, software designed to support the creation, refinement, and evaluation of proposals in collaborative settings. It provides a structured representation for a proposition and links it to objectives, evidence, methods, and assessment criteria.

The term is a coined blend of "propose" and action-oriented terminologies; used in scholarly discourse to denote the act of proposing and evaluating in a unified model.

The concept emerged in discussions on decision support and project governance in the 2010s; formal definitions appeared in theoretical papers and early software prototypes focusing on proposal management and collective decision making.

A proposat model typically includes a proposition node, associated objectives, contextual evidence, required resources, risks, and evaluation criteria. It supports versioning, provenance tracking, and collaboration where participants submit, comment, and revise proposals. Scoring uses multi-criteria decision analysis, weighted criteria, and sensitivity analysis. Output formats include human-readable summaries and machine-readable representations (JSON, RDF).

Applications include corporate project management, research funding competitions, policy deliberation, and software requirements documentation. It helps align stakeholders by providing traceable links from proposals to outcomes and metrics.

Limitations include the need for standard vocabularies, complexity that can impede adoption, and risks such as strategic manipulation of criteria and metadata overhead.

See also: Propositional logic, Decision analysis, Proposal management.