Evidence & Provenance
Understanding should remain traceable.
Every state that matters keeps its basis: where it came from, how fresh it is, and what is still unknown.
Evidence levelE1Architecture Defined
Why a state needs a trail.
A picture that cannot say how it was made cannot be reviewed, corrected or trusted by someone who was not there. Provenance is what makes the review possible.
Nine links from source to replay.
Each link records what it received, what it did and what it passed on, so any value can be walked back to where it began.
- SourceWhich sensor or feed, and its state at that moment.
- ObservationWhat was recorded, with its time and quality mark.
- CorrelationWhich observations were linked, and why.
- Unified stateThe state built from the links, and what it left out.
- ContextThe surroundings that were applied to the reading.
- ConfidenceThe band, and the evidence that set its width.
- Evidence referenceA pointer to the stored material a reviewer can open.
- Event historyEvery change of the state, in order, never overwritten.
- ReplayThe state as it was known then, shown again on request.
| Stage | Value |
|---|---|
| 1 | Source |
| 2 | Capture |
| 3 | Transform |
| 4 | Review |
| 5 | Release |
Confidence, evidence and provenance are three things.
They answer three different questions. Mixing them is how a confident picture ends up resting on nothing.
- ConfidenceHow sure is the platform? A band that moves with the evidence.
- EvidenceWhat is it based on? The stored material behind the band.
- ProvenanceWhere did it come from? The chain of steps that produced it.
Who contributed what.
Every state records which sources held the object, so a reviewer sees how much rests on one source.
- Source A
- Source B
- Source C
| Time (relative) | Source A | Source B | Source C |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10 | 6 | 0 |
| 2 | 12 | 8 | 0 |
| 3 | 13 | 10 | 2 |
| 4 | 12 | 12 | 4 |
| 5 | 11 | 13 | 7 |
| 6 | 10 | 13 | 10 |
| 7 | 9 | 14 | 13 |
| 8 | 10 | 13 | 16 |
Seven words for the state of a source.
The platform uses a fixed vocabulary. Every state has a word and a symbol, so colour is never the only signal.
- AvailableObservations arrive as expected.
- DelayedObservations arrive, but late.
- DegradedObservations arrive with lower quality.
- UnavailableNothing arrives from this source.
- UnknownThe platform cannot tell. It says so and does not guess.
- RestoringThe source is returning and is not yet trusted in full.
- RestoredThe source is back, and the gap stays in the history.
Evidence in the timeline.
The twin stores the evidence with each state. Scrub the timeline there and the evidence shown is the evidence that existed then.
- First observation
- Second source joins
- Gap
- State updated
- Rest state
| Time (relative) | Value |
|---|---|
| 6 | First observation |
| 28 | Second source joins |
| 50 | Gap |
| 72 | State updated |
| 94 | Rest state |
What provenance cannot do.
A trail shows how a value was made. It does not make the value true.
- A trail is not a proofA well-recorded chain can still record a wrong observation.
- Public view is limitedThis page describes the principle. It shows no real record, source name or stored material.
- Designed to, not proven toThe chain is defined at architecture level. It is not a claim about a running system.