Capacity Signal™ Evidence Vocabulary

Axis A Provenance

Who supports this piece of evidence.

Provenance describes a single source — not a claim, and not a firm. A claim supported by several sources carries the provenance of each. Provenance is never promoted: a self_published source is not upgraded by repetition. It is corroborated only by an independent source at the same grade or higher, which is recorded as an additional source at its own grade.

1. government_observed — a federal or provincial publication records it (proactive disclosure, CanadaBuys, an ISED ITB report).
2. registry — a public registry entry records it (a corporate registry, an accredited certification register).
3. certifier — a certification body’s own public record records it.
4. counterparty — a buyer or prime attests it (a buyer-validated correction, a press release naming the supplier).
5. supplier_confirmed — the supplier confirmed or corrected its own record, attributed and dated.
6. self_published — the supplier’s own website or profile.
7. inferred — derived by a stated rule from public data, with the rule recorded.

Axis B Event state

What the claim asserts actually happened.

Event state describes the thing claimed, independently of who says so. A contract award is government_observed plus awarded. The word delivered is never applied to an award record.

1. claimed — asserted, with no event yet asserted beyond the assertion itself.
2. qualified — admitted to a standing offer, supply arrangement, or pre-qualification list.
3. awarded — a contract was awarded.
4. contracted — a contract is in force.
5. delivered — the work or goods were delivered.
6. certified — a certification was issued and is in force.

Axis C Review status

Whether a named person read the source in context, and what they found.

Review status is set only by a named reviewer, and it is dated. It is a routing instruction — what to check next — not a grade of the firm.

1. reviewed — a named reviewer read the source in context and recorded that it directly supports the claim as worded.
2. supported — one or more open sources are consistent with the claim, but the support is indirect, secondary, self-declared, or not yet reviewed in context.
3. disputed — a named reviewer found credible sources or parties in conflict. The conflict is recorded and no single source is treated as settling it. This is a review status, not a separate axis: the conflicting sources keep their own provenance and event-state values.
4. unverified — no adequate open source has been found, or the only source has aged out of its stated freshness window.
5. no_claim — nothing has been asserted about this capability, so there is nothing to grade. A real firm is never shown as unverified for something nobody claimed.

The rules

1. Every graded claim carries all three axis values. A record showing fewer than three is not conformant.
2. No axis collapses into another. A high provenance grade does not set a review status. A review status does not imply an event state.
3. Provenance attaches to a source; review status attaches to a claim; event state attaches to the asserted event. These are different objects and are stored separately.
4. no_claim is not a negative finding. Absence of a claim is recorded as absence, never as failure.
5. Every value is dated. A review status without a review date is not conformant.
6. Values are not ranked across axes. Ordering within an axis is a matter for the implementation; this specification does not define a combined score, and a conformant implementation does not publish one.

Conformance

An implementation conforms to this specification when, for every graded claim it publishes, it records one value from each of the three axes using the identifiers above, and publishes the definitions or a link to this document.

This specification does not define display, colour, layout or ordering. Those are implementation choices and are deliberately out of scope at v0.1.

Scope and limits

This is version 0.1. It fixes the axes, the identifiers and the rules. It does not define a capability taxonomy, a source-freshness schedule, worked examples, or a conformance test suite. Those are candidates for v0.2.

This is the first public version, and it is open to revision. It is published, dated and citable as it stands; a later version does not amend this document but is published at its own permanent address, leaving this one unchanged.

Licence

This specification is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). You may share and adapt it for any purpose, including commercially, provided you give attribution.

Capacity Signal is a trademark of Civic Grove Ltd. The licence covers this specification; it does not grant rights in the mark.

Cite as

Civic Grove Ltd. (2026). Capacity Signal™ Evidence Vocabulary, version 0.1. https://capacitysignal.ca/spec/evidence-vocabulary/v0.1/
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22822163

Appendix — derived display annotations (non-normative)

Implementations commonly show short annotations on an evidence row. The following are derivations from the axes above, not additional values, and are recorded here so that an implementation does not mistake them for a fourth axis.

• Self-reported — provenance self_published or supplier_confirmed, review status supported.
• Estimated — provenance inferred.
• Stale — review status unverified, reached by a source ageing out of its freshness window rather than by absence of a source.

Disputed is not in this list — it is a review status in its own right (Axis C, value 3), because a reviewer read the sources and found them in conflict.