Knowledge gap
What it producesalso: gap · gap question · L3 · seed question · epistemic gap · frontier question · knowledge-gap questionA genuine unknown where what the requirements need and what established science delivers do not meet, stated as a question that a literature search cannot answer.
Step 6 writes the gap questions. Each must identify an epistemic gap that would change how the problem is thought about, and each is typed by what kind of gap it is. On the public site the gap is the unknown a hypothesis exists to explain; the reader meets it first as a rewritten heading stating its core, with the engine's original sentence folded underneath.
A gap question can also turn out to be already answered in the literature. The explanation layer says so plainly, because a pipeline proposing a closed gap is a valuable finding, not a failure.