Dacia data fields · Terra Chartarum

Why these are worth reading

Every filter on a Dacia layer is a scholarly claim compressed into a word. This page says what each word commits to. The full machine schema - column types, identifier formats, compile contracts - stays in the repository, because it answers a different question.

Confidence

How far the record travels from what a source actually says.

Value	What it means
`direct`	A source states this. No inference.
`high`	A short, uncontroversial step from what a source states.
`medium`	A reasoned inference a careful reader might make differently.
`low`	A possible reading, kept because discarding it would hide a real option.
`editorial_reconstruction`	This project supplied it. No source gives it.

Confidence is about the fact. It says nothing about where the shape on the map came from - that is the next field, and conflating the two is the single easiest way to misread this atlas.

Geometry provenance

Where the shape came from, kept deliberately separate from confidence.

Value	What it means
`corpus_reference`	The corpus’s own reference position for a place. Not an excavated centroid.
`joined_from_stations`	A line drawn through attested points, in their attested order.
`editorial_reconstruction`	Drawn by this project because the argument needed a shape.
`reconstructed_footprint`	A sheet or coverage outline rebuilt rather than taken from an index.

A well-attested fact can carry a drawn geometry. When it does, the atlas says so, rather than letting the confidence of the fact lend itself to the line.

Line type, on the frontier layer

Value	What it means
`treaty_line`	A frontier an instrument fixed.
`proposal`	A line put forward and not adopted.
`reconstruction`	A later scholarly redrawing.

These drive dash pattern and line width as well as colour, so the distinction survives for readers who do not see the hues. A proposal reads thin and dotted; a treaty line solid and heavy.

Attestation class, on the CND layers

What a source does about a place, including when it does nothing.

Value	What it means
`names`	The source names the place.
`describes`	The source describes it without naming it.
`silent`	The source could have named it and did not. Recorded as evidence.
`ambiguous`	The source names something that may or may not be this place.

Silence is data here. A source that surveys a region and omits a settlement is telling you something, and the corpus records it rather than leaving a gap that looks like an oversight.

Review state

Value	What it means
`pending`	Compiled and untouched by a human.
`normalized`	Machine-assisted work has taken it as far as it may go.
`reviewed`	A named person cleared it against a real locator.

Machine-assisted research stops at normalized by construction: the validator refuses to promote it without a named reviewer and a real locator. Nothing in the corpus is reviewed yet, and that is the gate working rather than failing.

Sovereignty and suzerain, on the principality layer

sovereignty records what kind of authority held the ground - direct rule, tributary autonomy, occupation, condominium. suzerain names the overlord where one existed. The two are separate because a principality could change its overlord without changing its internal arrangements, and drawing that as one field would flatten most of the period.