Where every line comes from, and how far it can be pushed.
A fact on VeCondo is only as good as what stands behind it. Every claim carries one of six evidence classes describing its sourcing — not its truth — and a citation back to the record it was read from.
LAST UPDATED 2026-09-09
01The six evidence classes
The class describes how a claim is sourced. It is deliberately not a confidence score and not a quality rating. An official record can be wrong; a single-source report can be right. What the class tells you is what you would have to go and check. The full ruleset is on Methodology.
A government registry, permit record, tribunal decision, or court record — obtained from the issuing body or its published dataset.
Permit registry entry · CRT decision · strata plan
A document was obtained and reviewed, and the claim was read at a specific page of it. The original and its hash are retained.
AGM minutes p.7 · engineering report p.42
Two or more independent sources report the same fact, with no primary document in hand.
Two news reports · council notice plus manager bulletin
One source reports the fact. No corroboration was located. Presented as reported, not as established.
One news article · one public notice
A public mention exists but has not been reviewed or corroborated. It marks a lead, not a finding.
Forum post · listing remark · uncited reference
Generated by a model from other records. Never styled to resemble verified evidence, never used to fill a gap silently.
Likely repair scope from permit description
02Registries and document types
VeCondo draws on public registries and on documents contributed by the people who hold them. Coverage is built district by district. Marked plainly: what is in use on this site today, and what the pipeline is built for but has not yet ingested.
03What is actually loaded on this site
- Map geometry — real. Footprints, heights, floor counts, streets, and SkyTrain alignments for Downtown Vancouver and Brentwood, Burnaby come from OpenStreetMap. A building with a published height is drawn to it; a building with only a floor count is drawn from that and labelled as a floor-count estimate; a building with neither is drawn at a placeholder height and labelled as a placeholder. The map never invents a height and then presents it as measured.
- Building dossiers — synthetic. The ten sample records are fabricated test fixtures used to exercise the evidence model, labelled as such throughout. They cite no real document and describe no real building.
- Registry ingestion — not yet. Nothing from the tribunals, courts, permit registries, or assessment data listed above has been ingested into this pilot.
04What is kept with every source
A citation that cannot be re-checked is not a citation. For each source document the record retains:
- the original file, unmodified, plus its cryptographic hash;
- a webpage snapshot where the source was a web page;
- rendered page images and the extracted text, including OCR output where OCR was used;
- the exact page or record reference the claim was read from;
- the processing timestamp, the model and version that read it, and the review status.
05Attribution and licensing
Map data on the map is © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Derived geometry rendered here remains subject to that licence. Public registry material is reproduced under the terms of the issuing body’s open-data or open-government licence, cited with the record. Contributed strata documents remain the property of their owners and are used under the licence described in Terms.
06Missing sources
Where a source should exist and does not, the record says so. A building with no located depreciation report shows a missing-evidence notice rather than an empty section, because an empty section reads as clean. If you hold a document that fills a gap, submit it.