Assertion

A statement a named party makes that no primary record has yet confirmed: a researcher's write-up, a press report, a company's self-report, or police statements relayed through the press.

Every field in a case carries one of these labels, its sources, and a confidence.

See also · The four claim types

Fact

A statement that a primary record makes: a regulator, a court, a standards body, the responsible company, an independent reproduction, or a public record. The Register never upgrades a claim to fact; the verifier can downgrade one.

Interpretation

The Register's reading of the evidence, labeled as such, including every pattern on the Patterns page.

Inference

A one-line claim about what a case means beyond its own domain. Each case carries at most one, and it must be signed by a named person before it is published if it names a company.

How to cite. Terms in the Register's vocabulary have a stable address: this page, or the anchor /glossary/#assertion on the full glossary. Control definitions are the canonical ones in the controls file; everything else follows schema v0.4.