How it works
Provenance
How data flows from authoritative sources through the engine to the API and exports.
Public data and APIs never bypass the engine. Data flows in one direction, and every response records where it came from.
The path of a fact
- 1Authoritative sources (NASA, ESA, IAU, …)
- 2Canonical knowledge graph (typed entities + relationships)
- 3Scientific Data Engine (resolve, relate, traverse, search)
- 4Public API & checksummed exports
The provenance envelope
Every API response wraps its data in a meta object:
| apiVersion | The API version (v0). |
| schemaVersion | Schema version the data conforms to. |
| dataVersion | Graph data version. |
| generatedAt | Fixed graph-release timestamp — deterministic, not per-request. |
| source | The engine that produced the response. |
| license | License for this response's data. |
| attribution | How to credit the data. |
| provenance | A note on how this specific response was derived. |