Data Integrity · ORE
Know how much of a source you can actually see.
Every system that turns records into decisions has sources it did not create: the feeds it subscribed to, the databases it imported, the attestations it accepted. When something later goes wrong, the failure gets called bad data. It almost never began as bad data. It began as unexamined confidence: nobody decided to trust the source, and the absence of a decision decided silently. ORE is CRAFT’s companion standard at the ingestion boundary. It sets out what a system may assume about its sources, graded and recorded where anyone can check it.
Origin, Reliability, Exposure
What an honest account of a source has to contain.
ORE does not tell you which sources are good. It tells you what an honest account of a source must contain, and what your system owes when that account is thin.
Origin
Did this input come from where it claims, and did it arrive unchanged? Provenance either holds or it does not, and strength here is never allowed to stand in for strength anywhere else.
Reliability
What confirmed this source's output, and could that confirmation itself be checked? Claim structure, confirmation architecture, and the track record a source earns over time.
Exposure
Every output that rests on ingested material carries the grade profile of its support, down to the weakest source in it. Nothing is quietly laundered into a downstream judgment.
The core move
Grades measure uncertainty, not worth.
A grade answers one question: how much of this source’s reliability can currently be seen, and what is being trusted that cannot be seen. A source about which little is verifiable is not a bad source; it is a source carrying more uncertainty, and the system’s response is calibrated use and closer monitoring, not a verdict. Ungraded and low-grade are different states with different obligations.
The system is never forbidden from using a thin source. It is forbidden from being quiet about it.
Five signatures can be one actor. Party count is visible; independence is not. ORE forbids a grading from letting the number of confirmations stand in for the independence of the confirmers, and where independence cannot be assessed, that inability is recorded on the grade rather than passed over.
Intake postures
Three ways to run intake, each declared in advance.
Systems legitimately differ in when grading happens and what ungraded material may touch. ORE does not pick a posture for you; it requires the one in force to be declared, enforced, and recorded with every admitted source, so no record’s history is ambiguous later.
Screened
Nothing enters without being graded first. The ingestion boundary is the review boundary.
Graded
Everything admitted enters at the grade its visible properties warrant, and review effort goes to the thinnest accounts first.
Open
Bulk material enters quarantined. It may serve discovery and search; it may not support a finding or a decision until it is graded.
Where it sits
CRAFT covers the chain. ORE covers what feeds into it.
A chain of evaluation can be sound at every step and still be built on an unexamined feed. ORE is where the chain makes its first legible commitment: this is what we let in, and this is what we admit we cannot see about it.
As of CRAFT v0.4.4, a chain that ingests material it did not create carries an ingestion boundary declaration, satisfied by adopting ORE or by declaring equivalent obligations. A condition-by-condition map of where ORE attaches to each of CRAFT’s six conditions ships in the ORE repository. ORE is independently adoptable: taking it requires taking nothing else.
The condition map, in one view