How we know, and what a blank means
An empty field on an ActivateDigital passport is an answer. It means we looked, we did not get to something we were willing to stand behind, and we would rather say so than write a number that looks right.
On this page
Four answers, not two
Most product data systems carry two states. There is a value or there is a blank, and the blank means nothing in particular. A passport built that way cannot tell a reader the difference between a duty that was discharged, a duty that does not arise and a duty nobody has checked.
The engine carries four answers instead.
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Resolved
A value was established from evidence we can point at.
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Not established
We looked and did not reach a value. This is the state that becomes an anonymous blank box almost everywhere else.
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Not applicable
The question does not arise for this product. It is a finished answer rather than a gap, and it is the one most systems have no way of expressing.
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Conflicted
Two sources we would each trust say different things, and neither has been thrown away.
Completeness runs on its own axis. A field can be complete, partial or empty independently of which of the four states it sits in, because a partial answer that is honest about being partial is worth more than a complete one that filled in the remainder. The economic operator contact field is permanently partial on every product we have run, because no public route corroborates an address, and saying so is more useful than a tick.
Every state a reader sees is written in plain words rather than in a code. A state that has to be looked up is decoration.
What a missing value is actually telling you
Absence is where this subject goes wrong most often, and it goes wrong in one direction. Somebody looks, finds nothing, then writes that there is nothing to find. Those are two different claims and usually only one of them is supportable.
So an absence is typed before it is written.
| Type | What it means | What may be written |
|---|---|---|
| Structural | The interface makes the lookup impossible rather than difficult. | There is no route, followed by why. |
| Access blocked | The record exists. Reaching it anonymously or for free is not possible. | It exists. Confirming it this way is not possible. |
| Licence blocked | The record exists. Reproducing it needs a licence. | It exists. Reproducing it needs permission. |
| Not found by us | We searched a stated scope on a stated date. | We looked here, in this scope, on this date and did not find it. |
| Not yet researched | Nobody has looked. This is our gap. | Nothing at all. It is an internal gap rather than a finding. |
We do not know that no number exists. We know we have not found one.
Only the first type supports a sentence saying that something is not there to be found, and even then the sentence explains what makes it impossible rather than asserting it. The SCIP reference is the one field in the passport that meets that bar, and the SCIP reference page sets out the interface reasons in full.
There is a second trap under the first. An absence measured by a process that could itself have failed to look is not a fact about the records. If nobody wrote the extractor for a field, then finding none of that field says something about the extractor. Wherever a coverage figure of zero appears in our material, the caveat travels in the same sentence as the figure.
When two sources disagree
Quietly picking a winner is the most common failure in product data, and it is the hardest one for a customer to detect afterwards, because the output looks exactly like an output that had no disagreement in it.
Where two direct sources disagree, both values are kept with their source stamps and the disagreement is shown rather than settled. Where two care labels disagree, that disagreement is kept too, rather than being smoothed away by quietly publishing the gentler of the two instructions.
The clearest example is a number we could have published and did not. Our own durability coefficient sometimes disagrees with the coefficient the French regulatory calculator divided by. Rather than publish their figure divided by our number, the adjusted result is withheld and the calculator's own undivided figure is published, named as a disagreement.
What our own build currently shows
Zero rows are conflicted on the current 34 variant test catalogue. That is a property of a catalogue with one source behind it rather than evidence that the mechanism is unnecessary. It changes the first time a supplier declaration meets a merchant's own record.
Where a value came from
A value without provenance is not a fact, it is a rumour. Every value on a passport traces back to something that was retrieved: which source it came from, which document, when it was retrieved and which part of that document held it.
Two consequences are worth stating, because both are visible to a reader rather than internal.
Source material is never edited
What a source returned is kept as it arrived. If a supplier declaration is ambiguous, the ambiguity survives into the record rather than being tidied on the way in, so the reason a value is what it is can still be reconstructed a year later.
A refusal is evidence
Where a check declines to answer, the refusal is recorded with its reason rather than discarded. That is what makes an empty box interpretable. Something was tried, it did not produce a value we would stand behind, and the reason is on the row.
The practical test for any of this is simple. If a value on a passport turned out to be wrong, could anybody establish where it came from and who said it. If the answer is no, the passport is a database with a nice front end.
Knowledge that decays on a schedule
Regulatory knowledge ages, and in this subject the cycles are knowable in advance rather than being a surprise. The Combined Nomenclature is republished every year, so a passport citing last year's commodity code is wrong in a way nobody notices. The REACH Candidate List is revised roughly twice a year, usually in January and June, so a bare count of substances goes stale silently.
Two dates therefore appear on every page here and they are never merged.
- Sources as at is a fact about the world. It is the oldest human verification date among the sources the page rests on rather than the newest, because a page is only as fresh as its weakest leg.
- Page last reviewed is a fact about us. A person read the sources behind the page and stood behind what it says.
Automated checking has one job, which is to notice that a source moved. It never decides what the movement means, it never rewrites a sentence and it never advances a review date. A monitor that advanced a verification date every time it found no change would be manufacturing confidence rather than measuring it.
Where a page's review date sits well behind the sources it depends on, the page says so on its face rather than leaving a reader to compare two dates and work it out.
What other people publish
Ranked evidence and trust taxonomies are not unusual, and anyone claiming novelty here should read four public ones first: the Battery Pass Consortium data model of November 2024, UN CEFACT's UNTP, WBCSD PACT at v3.0.3 and Catena-X together with TfS. Each of them grades where a value came from.
What none of the four models is the interesting half. A value that could not be established. The difference between a record that is unavailable and a record nobody checked. Two sources that disagree. Evidence that something is absent, as against no evidence either way.
That is where the difference sits. Not in having a hierarchy of evidence, which several people have, but in giving absence, conflict, staleness and resolution state somewhere to live.
What we publish
Enough to understand a result, and to disagree with it.
That means the rule and the reason behind every value, the state it resolved to, the sources under it and the date each one was last checked. Where a public method exists, as it does for the French environmental figures, we use the public one and say whose it is, so anybody can reproduce the number rather than take ours.
What stays private is the implementation. That is an ordinary commercial position rather than an interesting one, and it does not cost the reader anything, because none of it changes whether a value is right. The things that do change that are on the page.
Sources
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IndependentRelevant provisions reviewed
One of the four public precedents named above. The other three, UN CEFACT UNTP, WBCSD PACT at v3.0.3 and Catena-X with TfS, are named without a link because their addresses are not yet registered as sources here, and pointing a reader at an address nobody has verified is the habit this page exists to argue against.
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34th updateRegulator dataReviewed in fullChecked 21 August 2026
Named above as an example of a source that is revised on a known cycle, so a bare count goes stale silently.
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In forceRelevant provisions reviewed
The other worked example of scheduled decay. Republished annually, so last year's commodity code is wrong in a way nobody notices.