Signals

What a signal is

Every signal belongs to one category, carries the method that produced it, and records where it came from. Some signals describe what an asset declares about itself; others describe what Vettd measured or inferred from the artifact.

Shapes

A shape is what kind of claim a signal is. Five shapes can be produced by a rule; absence is a display state, not a produced signal. The most useful question is not how big the number is but whether a change in it is real.

Popularity figures are public repository statistics. They are context and can change on their own, without the asset changing.

Method and reproducibility

A measurement is exact given the method that produced it. If the method changes, the measurement changes with it: widening what a method counts is a new method, never a silent redefinition of the old one.

Not every number is a measurement. Popularity figures are public repository statistics: they can move on their own, without the asset changing, and they are context rather than a grade.

How each source produces evidence

Each source observes a different input and produces a different kind of evidence. The blocks below say who produces a signal, what the source observes, and what it does not see.

Registered rules

The rule IDs below are the identifiers Vettd uses internally for each check. Vettd registers 38 signal rules today, grouped by data category, and each rule is tagged with the source that produces it.

Safety has no registered rules: safety findings are stored as findings rather than as signals.

Absence

When a category has no signals, the record says so rather than staying blank. Both represent an absence, but they mean different things: not assessed, where no producer has reported anything for the asset, and nothing found, where a check ran and found nothing to report. Neither is a clean bill of health.