Method / Evidence Policy

What this archive preserves

The archive documents lighthouses, lightships, optics, lighthouse keepers, navigation signals, lost lights, and movable heritage assets as cultural and technical memory. A lighthouse may survive as a tower, a light, a lens, a route, a document, a photograph, a museum object, a disputed coordinate, or a story.

Public records are therefore treated as continuity records: they can describe present state, historical state, movement, loss, reuse, restoration, and memory without pretending that all evidence has the same certainty.

For the wider purpose behind these distinctions, read Preserving Historical Readability.

What counts as evidence

Sources are kept as provenance. Official navigation lists, heritage registers, archival catalogues, museum records, books, owner/operator pages, maps, field observations, and trusted lighthouse catalogues can all support different kinds of claims.

External identifiers such as Admiralty, NGA, ARLHS, Wikidata, OpenStreetMap, and heritage-register IDs are treated as provenance links and alignment aids. They do not replace the stable LUX identity of a record.

Where possible, facts are connected to source status, review status, confidence, and the period of time the claim describes.

Identity layers

Connected does not mean identical. The archive separates a lighthouse station, each physical structure, its navigational function, movable assets or components, institutions, and places. A function may transfer without a tower moving; an optic may enter a museum while retaining its own identity.

How public connections are selected

Public contextual discovery is deterministic, relation-backed, evidence-aware, and public-eligibility gated. It uses no behavioural personalization, popularity ranking, or external AI recommendation model.

A connection can remain hidden when its target route is not ready, evidence is not accepted, the relationship is too generic, rights are incomplete, the explanation is not semantically fair, or the publication level is insufficient.

Why some pages have no discovery section

An empty contextual-discovery state is valid and healthy. It does not prove that an entity is isolated; it means no connection currently passes every public route, evidence, rights, and explanation gate.

How claims are reviewed

The archive separates inherited source material from reviewed interpretation. Legacy pages, imported rows, external identifiers, and local review overlays are preserved as lineage; accepted public facts are promoted only when their evidence is sufficient for the claim being made.

A source may be strong for one fact and weak for another. For example, a current navigation list may support a light characteristic, while an archival publication may be stronger for an earlier apparatus, keeper history, or lost location.

This is why small changes can matter. A different flash pattern, a tower moved to a museum, or a lens attributed to a maker becomes heritage evidence only when it is tied to the right object, time period, source, and confidence level.

Heritage Journeys are built from reviewed records, relationships, sources, media, and open questions. Inside this heritage renderer, Story and Research are two modes of the same evidence-grounded journey: Story renders a guided sequence for readers, while Research renders the source table, movement timeline, relationship graph, uncertainty, and provenance behind that same sequence.

The public site exposes only a publish-ready subset. Records or pages with unresolved review findings can remain reachable but are quarantined from indexing until the issue is addressed.

Evidence in collaboration cases

Partner collections remain externally governed. LUX Light Archive records only the approved public evidence trail and its own interpretation; participation does not transfer authority over a collection or official record.

Case conclusions are scoped to the evidence reviewed. Sources remain distinct from interpretation, restrictions remain visible, and an unresolved conclusion can be a valid outcome.

Reusable practices emerge from observed use after a case, not from prior standardisation. See Evidence-backed collaboration.

How uncertainty is shown

Unknown, approximate, disputed, inherited, translated, interpretative, and not-yet-reviewed states are shown rather than hidden. This is part of the trust model: a careful archive should make uncertainty readable instead of converting it into false precision.

Coordinates, names, dates, status, visual material, and lifecycle events may therefore carry explicit context. A record can be useful even when it is incomplete, provided the limits of the evidence are clear.

Visual authenticity and AI

Public visuals distinguish documentary photographs, archival images, maps, drawings, restricted references, placeholders, intentionally omitted images, and AI-assisted illustrations.

AI may assist interpretation, but it does not replace evidence. AI-assisted images are labelled as interpretative and must not be described as documentary photographs, historical proof, or source evidence.

Images without adequate rights or attribution are kept out of public visual slots until reviewed. Restricted visual references may remain as metadata without public image display.

Lifecycle continuity

The archive records change over time: construction, rebuilding, automation, decommissioning, destruction, relocation, restoration, museum transfer, reuse, and memory. Movable assets such as lenses and lanterns are treated as heritage objects in their own right, not only as notes on tower records.

This continuity model is especially important for Lost Lights, lightships, optics, and places where the original tower no longer exists but the light, apparatus, documentation, or cultural memory survives.

A direct identity chain follows the current object, structure, station, or function through reviewed change. A separate related-object view can show reviewed objects reached within two steps through a shared manufacturer or place; this is discovery context, not a claim that those objects formed part of the current object's lifecycle. Research-only and otherwise hidden records remain outside every public graph, timeline, counter, and API payload.

Responsible reuse

Use LUX records with their context: cite the archive page, keep source/provenance links visible, and do not treat interpretative text or AI-assisted visuals as documentary proof. When a record shows uncertainty, preserve that uncertainty in reuse.

For export and reuse guidance, see Data / Reuse. For source context, start with the public Sources section and the provenance shown on individual records. For the project frame, see About LUX Light Archive.