The rules that keep a product-history timeline useful without turning gaps, labels, or retailer snapshots into claims they cannot support.
Publication gate
An identity page requires at least three product families, eight confirmed commercial observations, evidence across two calendar years, and five specific sources. Draft, disputed, and insufficiently sourced records stay out of public pages and downloads.
What counts as an observation
A ProductObservation is a dated, market-specific record. It may document catalogue identity, formulation, package and price, availability, ownership, manufacturing, or another explicitly named field. Several field-level observations can share a date because a package, seller page, and manufacturer page support different claims.
A product appearing today does not prove it had the same formula, package, price, owner, or availability in an earlier year. Missing years remain gaps.
Append-only history and corrections
Confirmed records are not silently overwritten. A correction or replacement receives its own UUID, points to the record it supersedes, and retains the earlier evidence trail. Product families and SKU identities are not recycled when packaging changes.
Change events are published only when evidence supports a dated launch, reformulation, resize, price change, ownership change, recall, relaunch, manufacturing change, or provenance-claim change.
Price normalization
A price observation records seller, market, package, date, availability, and unit basis. Promotions, tax, shipping, subscriptions, bundles, and location dependence are retained when known. Only compatible units and product formats are compared.
A median or percentage is not published until at least ten comparable products meet the stated sample definition. This pilot does not convert a small convenience sample into a market-wide statistic.
Rights and source handling
Manufacturer pages, retailer pages, reporting, archives, filings, recall notices, and standards remain the property of their respective rights holders. Public datasets expose source metadata, limited derived facts, links, archive references where available, and cryptographic checksums. Restricted captures are never copied into the public build.
Public access does not automatically grant commercial reuse. A licence for original editorial text does not automatically include photographs, quotations, packaging artwork, trademarks, or third-party records.
Collection schedule
Highlighted buying-guide products: price and availability review every 14 days.
Full tracked inventory: monthly package and price snapshot.
Ingredients, claims, and manufacturing: quarterly verification.
Ownership, recalls, and authenticity events: event-driven review.
Corrections and licensing
Report a source or observation problem through the Corrections Policy. Commercial use questions belong on the Licensing page.