Wildfire Knowledge Graph · Evidence
A controlled label describing how a material claim relates to its supporting information, such as observed, reported, derived, interpreted, disputed or unknown.
In plain language
The label tells readers what kind of statement they are looking at before they judge its strength.
Why it matters
A reported agency value, a direct observation and a technical interpretation should not all appear as identical facts.
Evidence state: make confidence and provenance inspectable
Evidence state describes the current status of a claim relative to its supporting information. A claim may be directly documented, estimated from data, provisionally reported, contradicted by later evidence or still unresolved. These distinctions should appear at the level of individual claims, not merely as one quality badge on an entire incident.
Example: a mapped burnt area from an official perimeter file can be labelled as a sourced measurement with its timestamp and resolution. A statement about ‘the exact path of the fire’ may remain an inference even when based on the same map. A reported cause can be ‘under investigation’ while acreage and containment are already officially published.
A transparent review log records a claim identifier, source URL, source date, reviewer date, numerical value or wording, stated uncertainty, current interpretation and reason for each material change. Revision should never silently erase an earlier source value.
An authority’s publication establishes what that authority reported; it does not necessarily prove all interpretations of the data. Conversely, an unresolved claim should not be described as false merely because a final report is unavailable.
Use Known At, the Source Library and the evidence methodology together.