Terms used in Whale Fall.

Entity

A person, organization, office, institution, project, source, or other structured object.

Relationship

A documented connection between two entities. It does not automatically imply influence, causation, control, conflict, or wrongdoing.

Source

The public record supporting a displayed fact, relationship, event, project, or measure.

Provenance

Information describing where a source came from, including original URL, archived copy, hash, retrieval state, and verified successor when applicable.

Verified successor

A current source independently matched to a historical source using strong identity evidence and verified retrieval.

Publication-safe

A record that has passed the project's public publication boundary.

Research-only

Material that has not crossed the publication boundary, such as parser candidates, unresolved identities, weak matches, or hypotheses.

Observed literal

Text explicitly present in a source document and extracted as a candidate for review.

Inferred candidate

An interpretation derived from evidence rather than a literal source statement. It requires separate review.

Whale Fall

The public-facing project and interpretive layer.

Arkansas Structural Atlas

The internal evidence/database/graph machinery supporting Whale Fall.