Observations and provenance
Geographic information carries different kinds of evidence, authority, and recency.
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Features and evidence
EDK can represent persistent real-world objects, events, administrative records, conditions, and visual detections. Where available, normalized output retains the source context needed to understand the result.
Visual and reported
| Observation | Evidence | Useful context |
|---|---|---|
| Visual | Imagery or video, including street-level, satellite, aerial, or other captured visual data. | Capture time, image or sequence reference, detection method, confidence, location, and source. |
| Reported | Structured records published by agencies, people, automated systems, collaborative mapping, or other sources. | Publisher, record time, source identifier, category, status, and how the record was normalized. |
Keep source context available
Applications may judge recency, authority, and reliability differently depending on the task. Provenance should therefore remain available rather than being erased by normalized geographic output.
Visual and reported are evidence categories. Neither alone determines whether a result is more useful; the source and the record's actual assertion matter.