Data & provenance
Gapwise treats provenance as product data. Public campus facts are not simply values: their source, freshness, verification status, and uncertainty determine how safely downstream applications can use them.
Verification states
Section titled “Verification states”Depending on the resource, facts can carry states such as:
verified— supported by the cited source at the recorded verification time.stale— known source-backed information whose freshness window has expired.inferred— derived conservatively from other supported facts rather than directly observed.user-reported— reported by a user or community source and not equivalent to an official verified fact.unavailable— Gapwise cannot currently obtain the fact from an appropriate source.unknown— the available data cannot support a positive or negative conclusion.
Never collapse those states into one generic truthy/falsy value.
Absence is not a negative fact
Section titled “Absence is not a negative fact”A missing external source is not equivalent to a negative fact:
- unavailable hours do not mean a place is closed;
- unavailable accessibility evidence does not mean a route is accessible or inaccessible;
- a missing live operational feed does not prove normal operations;
- an unsurveyed entrance does not prove no entrance exists.
This distinction is especially important in automation and accessibility-sensitive interfaces.
Version metadata
Section titled “Version metadata”Canonical responses include meta.dataVersion for the relevant campus dataset. Some resources also include meta.generatedAt for the underlying snapshot. Use those fields to diagnose stale caches and to make reproducible decisions about source-backed data.
API version, campus data version, and SDK package versions are independent. Updating one does not imply that the others changed.
Time-dependent facts
Section titled “Time-dependent facts”Place availability is evaluated only when published hours and their provenance support it. Because current availability changes with time, place responses use Cache-Control: no-store and expose open, closed, or unknown explicitly.
Attribution
Section titled “Attribution”Where Gapwise incorporates third-party datasets, their attribution and licensing obligations remain applicable. For example, OpenStreetMap-derived data retains the relevant OpenStreetMap attribution and ODbL obligations. Gapwise source code is separately licensed under MIT unless a file or bundled dataset states otherwise.