Methodology
How a claim becomes evidence.
OrenAtlas keeps the source, transformation and human review of every fact together, so a decision is understandable after the meeting is over. This page is the whole model — the pipeline, the states, and the boundaries of what we claim.
From requirement to decision
Nine steps, one trail. Each step preserves what the previous one established — nothing is flattened into a score along the way.
Requirement
Everything starts from what actually needs to be true — a buyer requirement, a compliance question, a market-entry condition. Evidence is organized against it, not collected for its own sake.
Source
Where a fact comes from decides how far it can be trusted. Official registries, issuer databases and government sources rank above supplier submissions; nothing rests on scraping.
Evidence item
A single record — an identity fact, a licence, a certificate, a filing, a document — attached to the exact legal entity, facility or product it names.
Provenance
Every item carries its source, URL where available, and retrieval date. Provenance stays attached through every view and export.
State
Each item has an explicit state — source-backed, supplier-provided, pending review, missing, expired, conflicting, human reviewed. There is no single broad “verified company” state.
Freshness
Evidence ages. Retrieval and expiry dates are visible, and stale records are shown as stale rather than quietly treated as current.
Missing & conflicting
What is absent or contradictory is surfaced as its own finding — a gap to request, a conflict to resolve — never averaged away.
Human review
People confirm what machines assemble. Review decisions are recorded with the reviewer’s judgment visible, and nothing is published as reviewed without one.
Decision / next action
The output is a documented decision or the specific next action — request this evidence, resolve this conflict, proceed with these conditions — with the uncertainty still on the table.
The evidence states
One vocabulary across the whole platform — the same states you see on Product pages, industry pages and inside the workspace.
Retrieved from an official or issuer source, attached to the exact subject it names.
Submitted by the company itself. Useful, clearly labelled — and never the basis of a conclusion on its own.
On file, awaiting human review. Not yet usable as reviewed evidence.
Expected for the requirement but not on file. A gap to request — never converted into a neutral or positive signal.
Was supported once; the validity or retrieval date no longer covers today. Shown as such.
Two records disagree. The conflict is flagged for resolution, not silently resolved by rank.
A person examined the evidence and recorded a judgment. The reviewer and basis stay visible.
The honest end state when available sources cannot settle the question.
Why uncertainty stays visible
Hiding uncertainty makes a platform look confident and a decision fragile. Showing it does the opposite: a buyer who can see that two records conflict, that a licence names a different legal entity, or that a certificate expires in forty days can act on that — request the evidence, ask the question, set the condition. Every gap we surface is a decision made safer, and every state we refuse to inflate is trust we do not have to walk back later.
Boundary
What OrenAtlas is not.
We do not convert incomplete data into a broad approval, a “verified company” badge or a universal score. Where live state cannot be proven, the interface says so — and creates the review path instead.