--- title: "Temporal facts" summary: "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." canonical_url: https://entitybind.com/glossary/temporal-facts last_updated: 2026-10-15 copy: full --- # 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. Canonical page: https://entitybind.com/glossary/temporal-facts Last updated: 2026-10-15 Glossary · Data, licence and time ## How to read this 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](https://entitybind.com/glossary#data). By [James Rooney](https://entitybind.com/about), founder of Entity Bind · Last revised 15 October 2026 ## What temporal facts means A temporal fact is a value stored with the period it was true for and the history of when it was seen, rather than as a single current value that overwrites its predecessor. It is needed because companies change: names change, registered offices move, directors come and go, status moves from active to liquidation. A store that keeps only the current value can answer 'what is the address' and cannot answer 'what was the address when we onboarded them', which is the question that matters in a dispute, an audit or a KYB refresh. Doing this properly needs two independent time axes. Valid time is when the fact was true in the world; transaction time is when the system learned it. They are different, they move independently, and a system with only one of them will eventually assert that a fact became true on the day it was loaded. Half-open intervals are the conventional representation, so that consecutive periods abut without overlapping. Temporal facts also change what a confidence score can mean. A value seen once six months ago and a value confirmed by three sources this month are different evidence, and a model that stores only the value cannot distinguish them. Entity Bind stores facts with the source's own effective date where the source publishes one, a first-seen timestamp, a last-checked timestamp and a confirmation count. Survivorship ranks on last confirmed rather than on first seen, and re-confirmations by the same source are counted separately from independent corroboration, so the two counts stay distinguishable. ## 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 coverage](https://entitybind.com/coverage): The 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. - [The API reference](https://entitybind.com/api): The REST surface: payloads, the decision outcomes, the error model, the usage block and the ceiling on the confidence field. - [Reference data](https://entitybind.com/use-cases/reference-data): Identifier crosswalks, where each fact came from, and what a cited fact has to carry to be usable downstream. 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 free →](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) ## The terms next to this one Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one. - [First seen](https://entitybind.com/glossary/first-seen): First seen is the timestamp at which a system first observed a fact, which is evidence about the system's own history and not about when the fact became true. - [Last confirmed](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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'. - [Provenance](https://entitybind.com/glossary/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](https://entitybind.com/glossary/survivorship): Survivorship is the set of rules that picks which value wins, field by field, when the records in a cluster disagree. - [Golden record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/golden-record): A golden record is the single assembled view of an entity built by choosing one value per field from the records attached to it, ideally with the provenance of each choice carried alongside it. - [Record](https://entitybind.com/glossary/record): A record is one observation of an entity from one source at one time — the unit that arrives, is compared and is attached, never the unit that is trusted on its own. ### Answered at length elsewhere - [KYB data requirements](https://entitybind.com/guides/kyb-data-requirements) (Guide): What a know-your-business onboarding flow actually needs, field by field, and which step is identity resolution. Explicitly not a screening, scoring or eligibility tool. ## 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. - [Licence tier](https://entitybind.com/glossary/licence-tier) - [Pass-through data](https://entitybind.com/glossary/pass-through-data) - [First seen](https://entitybind.com/glossary/first-seen) - [Last confirmed](https://entitybind.com/glossary/last-confirmed) - [PSC (person with significant control)](https://entitybind.com/glossary/psc) - [Beneficial ownership](https://entitybind.com/glossary/beneficial-ownership) Previous, alphabetically: [Survivorship](https://entitybind.com/glossary/survivorship) · Next, alphabetically: [Ticker symbol](https://entitybind.com/glossary/ticker) ## Evidence basis 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. ## Start with your own company records. Create your workspace, verify your email and run your first company file. The Free plan needs no card. Create API keys in your workspace when you need an integration. [Start free](https://app.entitybind.com/app?signup=1) · [All 64 terms](https://entitybind.com/glossary) 300 credits. No card. For a guided review of your file, explore [the Merge Safety Sprint](https://entitybind.com/audit-pack). --- Entity Bind resolves companies and organisations only. It does not resolve people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions exposure, emissions or geolocation, and its results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy. This is the Markdown copy of https://entitybind.com/glossary/temporal-facts, assembled from the same data the page renders and carrying every sentence, table row, figure and question the page's main content carries. The HTML page is canonical; it adds the layout, the navigation and the interactive parts (the ask panel, the forms), which a copy can name but not run. Every page on the site, with a line on each: https://entitybind.com/llms.txt.