Research methodology

Scope

Each dossier investigates public evidence for named information systems, cloud services, digital platforms, and their delivery or support companies.

Evidence rules

• Open every source; search snippets and infrastructure fingerprints are leads, not evidence.
• Prefer official service pages, procurement records, contracts, project records, and vendor case studies.
• Attribute a contractor only when the source supports a precise role.
• Distinguish developer, implementer, maintainer, host, cloud provider, software vendor, and reseller.
• On every generated client card, keep contractors attached to the exact system row they worked on and link each named contractor to its generated contractor card. Unknown contractors remain explicit and unlinked.
• Record historical, current, planned, and completed work separately when dates matter.
• Do not infer an organization-wide platform from one isolated technology signal.
• Keep unresolved material questions visible in each dossier.

Per-system infrastructure and lifecycle analysis

Every generated system dossier shows three system-level fields:

• Cloud / on-premises: the evidenced production hosting model (cloud, on-premises, or hybrid) and the named environment or provider when known.
• System kickoff: the evidenced start of the original system delivery or implementation, recorded only to the precision supported by the source.
• Latest production release: the latest directly evidenced production release or deployment date, not the date a source page was updated.

Unknowns remain explicit. DNS, IP ownership, CDN headers, cloud-service eligibility, a supplier's generic cloud capability, procurement publication, contract signature, project completion, and webpage timestamps are discovery leads, not substitutes for these facts. Client-specific adoption or hosting facts are not promoted to a shared-system claim unless the evidence applies to the system as a whole.

Status vocabulary

Status	Meaning
researched	Material publicly identifiable systems have been investigated and evidenced.
partial	Useful evidence exists, but material questions remain unresolved.
no-public-evidence	No defensible systems claim was found in the reviewed public sources.
pending	Investigation has not started.

Status measures evidence coverage. It does not assess an organization's technology quality, security, or maturity.

Confidence vocabulary

• High: an official or primary source explicitly proves the stated relationship.
• Medium: a credible explicit source supports the claim, but independent corroboration or current-status evidence is incomplete.
• Low: indirect evidence is retained only as a qualified lead and is not promoted to a confirmed claim.

System and contractor identity

System records preserve every client observation. Generic labels remain client-scoped, while unmistakably identical named systems may be consolidated through reviewed alias rules. Registry IDs beginning with SYS- are deterministic identifiers generated by this project from canonical identity keys; they are not public system identifiers.

Contractor records are derived only from named entities in canonical Client → System observations. Registry IDs beginning with CTR- are generated from normalized evidenced names. Similar-looking names are not silently merged, unknown suppliers never become entities, and every contractor card links back to the precise client and system relationship that produced it.