Evidence

How evidence is labelled.

Every capability shown carries a level: where the claim came from and who, if anyone, checked it. A level attaches to one fact, never to a whole facility, and public never means available.

The five levels

Who vouches for a fact.

Nothing on this ladder can be bought. Saving a problem, paying, or claiming a profile never raises a level; a fact moves up by a person, one fact at a time, and a model cannot lower it.

Level	What it means	Checked by	What it never means
publicly-sourced	Extracted from a public source. It remains a research lead.	nobody	That the instrument still exists, or that anyone operates it.
ai-normalised	Structured by a pipeline from public evidence, with its source and retrieval date. Still a lead.	a pipeline	That the constraints were read correctly.
human-reviewed	A named reviewer confirmed that the cited evidence supports this specific claim and its method mapping.	a named reviewer	That the facility has agreed to anything.
provider-verified	The provider confirmed this specific fact. Other facts on the same profile do not inherit it.	the facility	That the work has ever been delivered through the platform.
transaction-verified	A completed, paid project used this capability, and the claim was reviewed again afterwards.	a completed project	That the next result will match the last.

No capability record has been reviewed for publication yet, so there is nothing to count. The levels above describe what a record will carry when one is.

Why leads, not listings

A name is not evidence, and a lead is not a commitment.

FIG. 4A directory gives you a name and a claim. A lead here gives you the name, its evidence level and its source, and asks you to verify before contact. A commitment needs a person to approve the route and the facility to confirm feasibility and its own terms. Ranking cannot be bought at any of the three.

A public record means a bounded lead tied to public evidence, with its level, its source and the date it was retrieved, and the official page the facility publishes. It never means that the configuration is installed or unchanged today, that the facility accepts this sample or this customer, that capacity or turnaround exists, or that a price or a contact does. Where a record says nothing, the page shows unknown rather than a guess.

Corrections

A disputed fact is reviewed before further use.

If a provider disputes a fact, we review the request and suppress the fact where appropriate before further use. This preview does not offer suppression without review, a permanent opt-out, or notice before a profile is shown; those belong to the provider workflow.

For laboratories Describe a problem

How the model behind this works, for the curious

Four readings of one dataset

Research layer — the complete working dataset, including unresolved detail. Private, never browsable, indexed or routed.
Bounded lead layer — up to three case-specific facility leads with citations. AI-normalised rows remain unconfirmed and cannot create a request or an introduction.
Reviewed core — records a named reviewer confirmed; the first level considered for a human-mediated next step.
Routable — reviewed, industrial access confirmed, a routable contact, no suppression. Never published; it exists so a person can send one request to one recipient.

How a fact moves

Review moves a fact to human-reviewed; a provider’s field-level confirmation moves that field to provider-verified.
A completed platform project may support transaction verification after review.
Levels ratchet upward only, with named provenance. If a source changes, the claim should be reviewed again; it is not lowered automatically, and a model cannot lower it at all.
Revoking a confirmation removes the display and keeps the evidence and the audit record.

Sources, and what is never published

The research layer was built from public web evidence, one source at a time, with retrieval dates and a stored snapshot wherever the page allowed one. A record resting on a single source says reported, not documented.
Never published: personal contact details of staff; rate cards or any rate a provider has not authorised; internal confidence scores; the raw dataset, bulk results or an open catalogue.
Three different absences: unknown — no source states it and we can ask; on request — the provider’s own stated basis; withheld — the provider declined to publish it. Zero is none of these; zero is a number shown with its basis.