Reconciliation

Many parties say things about one event: its producer, sources CastHQ watches, members, agents. Each statement is a claim. CastHQ never overwrites a claim and never deletes one; it picks which claim each fact shows, records the pick as a change, and keeps the rest visible.

Claims

A claim asserts one fact (schedule, status, title, location, links) about one event, with:

• an origin, from the claimant's standing on that event, not from who they are in general: producer (the party the event belongs to), observed (a witness: a watched source, a member, an agent without standing) or admin (CastHQ, ruling on a conflict);
• the time it was observed;
• optionally an evidence link (source_url) and the hash of the page CastHQ fetched and read;
• optionally the claim it supersedes: a party correcting itself.

Claims are append-only. A correction is a new claim.

Picking the winner

For each fact, among the claims nobody has superseded, the winner is the first by:

1. origin: admin over producer over observed;
2. then recency: the most recently observed;
3. then the claimant's own stated confidence, which only breaks ties within one origin at one instant.

A weaker origin never outranks a stronger one, however recent or however many say it. The winner's value is what every surface shows, and moving it writes one change, in the same transaction as the claim. A claim that loses writes no change of its own, but can open a dispute (below) and can move the fact's confidence.

Precision

A date is a window with a precision (datetime, day, month, quarter, half, season, year, window, tba), never a made-up day. A schedule change is classified as scheduled (a first date), moved_earlier, moved_later, narrowed (the window shrank inside the old one), widened or undated, and carries delta in seconds. Surfaces never state a date more precise than its precision.

Disputes

A party disputes a fact when its latest claim:

• differs from the value shown,
• comes from a different party than the winner (a party revising itself is a correction, not a dispute),
• is not superseded, and
• carries an http(s) evidence link.

When a party starts disputing, CastHQ writes a dispute change with semantic opened; when it stops (it came round, it won, or a new winner agrees with it), resolved. A party already disputing that changes its value is still one dispute. While a dispute is open and CastHQ has not ruled, the fact's confidence is disputed. An admin ruling settles it.

Open disputes are listed as contested on the status answer. Never present a contested value as the date.

Confirmation, in words

The status answer says, for each fact, who the shown value rests on:

Say which when repeating a value: "confirmed by the producer", or "reported by {source}, not confirmed by the producer".

Guarantees

• Every change is ordered: the feed cursor never skips a committed change.
• Every change names the claim that caused it, with its provenance, and can be verified against CastHQ's published keys.
• The same claims give the same winner, the same changes and the same confidence. Rules that could move a level are versioned, and a rule change that moves one is itself recorded as a change.