A Data Fidelity Register is a set of an organization’s facts, each one bound to its public source and sealed so it can be checked.
A register is built from an organization’s own sources, one fact at a time, in five steps.
Curation
A register begins with a decision about what it is of. The organization’s own public sources, its results releases, its filings, its official registrations, are chosen and scoped, so a reader knows exactly what the register covers and what it does not.
This is where the register mirrors the organization’s authoritative record rather than the web’s account of it. Only the organization’s own sources are admitted, and it carries what those sources establish, not what circulates elsewhere.
Extraction and structuring
Each fact is drawn from its source and made precise: a named value, its unit, the period it covers, the exact passage it came from, and the address of the source. A model proposes each fact, a separately configured model reviews it against its cited passage, and then a person checks it. A fact is admitted only when its source establishes it plainly; what a source does not support is left out.
Sealing
Each fact is reduced to the six fields that give it meaning, and a SHA-256 fingerprint is computed over them. Change any one of those fields and the fingerprint no longer matches, which is what makes tampering detectable. The seal covers what the fact asserts, not how it is displayed, so a register can be reformatted without breaking a single seal.
Publication and anchoring
The register is published on the organization’s own domain, as static files. The fingerprints of a release are combined into a single value with a Merkle tree, and that value is signed and entered in Sigstore’s Rekor, a public transparency log that Apparat does not control. From then on, anyone can confirm the release existed and has not changed, independently.
Verification and maintenance
Anyone can verify a register without asking Apparat: recompute the fingerprints from the published facts, rebuild the Merkle root, and find it in the public log. If every step agrees, the register is exactly what was published, unchanged. As the organization publishes new facts they are added, sourced and sealed like the rest, so the record stays current; corrections are made in the open, as new releases, with the history left intact.
Below is a single entry, shown to make the shape plain. A register is many of these, published together on the organization’s own domain.
This entry is a real fact from Believe’s register, shown to make the structure plain. The seal is a SHA-256 fingerprint over the fact’s six fields, so any later change to the value, the period, the quote or the source is detectable. Every fact in a register carries one.
The facts in a release are sealed together, and the release itself is anchored so the whole set is tamper-evident:
The individual seals are combined into a single fingerprint, the release commitment, using a Merkle tree, and that commitment is signed and entered in a public log. Anyone can confirm the entry exists in the log independently of Apparat.
To see a real register in full, with every fact, its source and its seal, and to check it for yourself:
Specification
Verifier
Standards
Apparat builds and operates Data Fidelity Registers for organizations. If getting your public facts right matters, the place to start is a short conversation about what a register would cover.
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