First seen
The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. Filed under data, licence and time.
Facts have owners and dates. What may be stored, what may only be passed through, and what a date on a fact actually asserts.
every figure, with its population →What first seen means
First seen answers 'how long have we known this'. It is useful for establishing that a fact predates an event — that a company's address was already on record before the invoice was raised — and for distinguishing a long-standing value from one that appeared last week.
Its most important property is what it is not. First seen is not the date the fact became true in the world: a register's own effective date carries that, and where the source does not publish one the value is null rather than a default copied from the retrieval time. A system that fills the effective date from the ingest time is inventing history, and the invented dates are indistinguishable from real ones afterwards.
First seen is also a poor survivorship signal on its own. Ranking by first seen prefers whichever source happened to be loaded earliest, which is a property of the integration schedule rather than of the data.
Entity Bind records first seen on every fact, alongside last checked, a confirmation count and the source's own effective date where one exists. Survivorship ranks on last confirmed rather than first seen, because currency is the question a golden record is being asked.
Where this shows up in Entity Bind
Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price.
- Register coverageThe registers the resolver reads, the licence each one publishes under, and how often a live entity's name is unique once it is tidied to a common form.Open
- The API referenceThe REST surface: payloads, the decision outcomes, the error model, the usage block and the ceiling on the confidence field.Open
- Reference dataIdentifier crosswalks, where each fact came from, and what a cited fact has to carry to be usable downstream.Open
The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide.
Start freeThe terms next to this one
Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one.
Last confirmed
Last confirmed is the most recent time a fact was observed still to hold, which is the freshness signal a golden record should rank on and a weaker claim than 'currently true'.
Temporal facts
A temporal fact is a value stored with the period over which it was true and the history of when it was observed, rather than as a single current value that silently overwrites its predecessor.
Provenance
Provenance is the record of where each individual value came from — which source, retrieved when, effective when — attached to the value itself rather than to the dataset as a whole.
Survivorship
Survivorship is the set of rules that picks which value wins, field by field, when the records in a cluster disagree.
The other 6 terms on this shelf
Facts have owners and dates. What may be stored, what may only be passed through, and what a date on a fact actually asserts.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
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