Where this comes from
Every figure in Vaethra traces to a named publisher with a timestamp. This page explains what is collected, how it is ranked, and what the limits are.
The evidence ladder
Not all records deserve equal weight, so they are not given it. Every record carries a tier, and every view can be filtered by it:
- Measured
- Direct observation — satellite radar, vessel telemetry, network measurement, published statistics.
- Official
- A government or intergovernmental body published it.
- Research-grade
- Peer-reviewed or academically coded datasets.
- Modelled
- Model output, labelled as such wherever it appears.
- Reported
- A single machine-coded press report. Counted, but heavily discounted — one feed can emit tens of thousands a day and corroborated sources cannot.
Licences are respected, visibly
Sources arrive under different terms, and those terms are enforced in the software rather than in a policy document. Some require attribution, which is shown on every record. Some permit analysis but not public redistribution — those are used to inform derived indicators and are never displayed as events.
Where a provider publishes weeks behind, that lag is carried on every reading rather than smoothed away, and such sources corroborate but never drive a signal.
Freshness
Collection runs continuously; most feeds are re-read every few minutes, and the Terminal shows which are currently reporting and which are not. A feed that stops is visible as a feed that stopped — not as an absence of events.
Known limits
- Coverage follows what public sources report, which is uneven by region and by domain.
- Absence of a record is not evidence that nothing happened.
- Dependency data only covers relationships somebody publishes. Undisclosed ones are invisible, and are often the ones that matter most.
- Model output is labelled and separated from observation everywhere, on purpose.