Evidence, Structured Telemetry & Verification Standards
How 404TN collects, ingests, categorizes, attributes, normalizes, compares, and audits evidence. Why our independent accountability mandate never compromises evidentiary rigor.
The Three-Tier Classification Standard
To prevent political discourse from being mistaken for empirical fact, 404TN applies strict epistemic segregation across all published material.
Directly Substantiated Assertions
Discrete factual claims verified directly via official state gazettes (JORT), statutory bulletins (INS, BCT, ONAGRI), definitive election results certified by ISIE, or multi-source corroborated documentary evidence.
Attributed Political Statements
Official government declarations, ministerial justifications, political speech excerpts, opposition allegations, or uncorroborated witness testimony. Preserved as attributed discourse; never converted to factual baseline.
404TN Editorial Interpretation
Contextual synthesis, institutional accountability evaluations, and causal analysis derived from documented legal changes, economic trendlines, and comparative multi-year indicators.
Automated Ingestion & Editorial Admission
How candidate articles, bulletins, and reports move from raw discovery feeds to the public evidentiary record.
Editorial Acceptance for Official & Field Sources
Publications from verified official and field sources undergo mandatory human editorial triage to verify cryptographic hash uniqueness (SHA-256), canonical domain matching, valid timestamping, and evidentiary reliability prior to publication in the public record.
Archival Note: Automated ingestion statuses (such as legacy AUTO_ACCEPTED) are preserved for technical provenance auditing; public publication strictly requires explicit editorial review.
Editorial Inspection & Candidate Triage
Submissions from secondary news outlets, civil society alerts, or borderline reports with ambiguous attributions are placed in REVIEW_REQUIRED status. A human editor inspects document identity, claims, and geography before transitioning them to ADMITTED or REJECTED.
Fail-Closed Gate: Non-admitted candidates remain private and are excluded from public discovery, search, and API feeds.
Assertions, Propositions & Predicates
404TN decomposes unstructured natural language reports into atomic, verifiable structured evidence dimensions.
An atomic measurement or status mentioned in text, bounded by exact character start/end offsets, source field, and raw unit string.
A normalized empirical claim representing one subject, predicate, temporal window, and geographic scope within an evidence record.
Explicit relational links (proposition_observations) tying every proposition back to its constituent source assertions.
When a single article cites conflicting numerical measurements for the same predicate (such as citing national unemployment as both 16.2% and 38.6% for graduates), 404TN does not guess, average, or arbitrarily select one. The proposition enters MULTI_VALUE_UNRESOLVED resolution mode: its resolved numeric value remains strictly null, and all observed figures are recorded transparently.
Pairwise Comparison & The Anti-Inflation Invariant
Rigorous mathematical comparison between independent documentary reports without vote multiplication.
Comparison Outcomes
- AGREES Both sources report compatible dimensions and identical normalized numeric/state values. Corroborates historical baseline.
- DISAGREES Sources evaluate identical comparison keys (subject, predicate, temporal window, location) but assert conflicting values.
- NOT_COMPARABLE Dimensional mismatch in temporal precision, geographic scope, or predicate units. Never recorded as a conflict.
Anti-Inflation Invariant
Evidence observations are not votes. An article that repeats the same measurement five times produces exactly one proposition vote. Cross-source comparison evaluates propositions strictly between distinct evidence records ($left \ne right$).
Disagreement Tracking Without a Truth Engine
Why 404TN documents factual conflicts between official and independent sources without claiming sovereign authority to pick a winner.
No Truth Engine · No Source Winner
When state utilities and independent observatories publish conflicting numbers (e.g. dam reservoir reserves or peak electrical load), 404TN records the divergence deterministically in the Conflict Ledger. The platform does not synthesize an artificial consensus, declare one publisher "true" and another "false", or deploy opaque AI arbitration.
Pairwise comparator automatically detects substantive divergence on identical comparison keys.
Human editors record qualitative investigation notes in conflict_reviews without altering underlying evidence immutability.
The 6-Category Source Hierarchy
Every record published on 404TN is indexed with explicit source provenance according to its institutional nature and legal authority.
Journal Officiel de la République Tunisienne (JORT), presidential decrees, statutory court rulings (Administrative Court), and official treaties.
INS quarterly labor reports, ANPE environmental monitoring, ONAGRI water balances, STEG electrical dispatch logs, and Central Bank (BCT) financial bulletins.
FTDES social observatory protest logs, SNJT press freedom audits, IWatch anti-corruption monitoring, and Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH) filings.
Arab Barometer public opinion surveys, Afrobarometer polling, and peer-reviewed university research papers.
World Bank economic assessments, IMF staff reports, UN agency field data (UNHCR/IOM), and international sovereign rating agencies (Moody's, Fitch).
Multi-source verified investigative press reporting, field witness accounts, and corroborated regional journalism.
When continuously published public datasets cannot be identified or remain unpublished by state agencies (such as continuous ambient emissions feeds in Gabès or itemized penal reconciliation accounts), 404TN does not generate speculative estimates. Instead, we document the omission as a formal DATA GAP, identifying the accountable authority, the affected period, and why the omission matters to the public interest.