Understand the data
before the finding.

A useful investigation makes the source, age and limits of the evidence clear.

Read freshness carefully

State	What to check	What it does not establish
Live / receiving	Evidence of current source delivery and the observation timestamp.	Continuous coverage, every vessel being current, accuracy or commercial-use rights.
Stale	An older stored observation, with its source and last observed time.	The vessel’s current location or the reason new observations are missing.
Unavailable	No usable data or a failed acquisition for the requested workflow.	That the underlying vessel or event does not exist.
Demonstration	Synthetic or sample records explicitly labelled for evaluation.	Verified activity by a real vessel or a live provider result.

Freshness is evaluated for the relevant observation and workflow. Do not infer live coverage from a successful page load, a cached record count or an HTTP success response. Historical inspection found fresh and stale observations together; this is not a current feed-status dashboard.

Available source evidence

Earlier production checks observed AIS ingestion and vessel records. A successful current satellite acquisition and detection run was not established by those checks. A SAR search control, configured connector or empty cache does not prove current satellite coverage.

Use only the sources actually present in the case. Premium satellite observations, specialist feeds and third-party document verification are not implied by this documentation or by a subscription plan.

Three different times

Observation time: The timestamp supplied with a vessel observation. Its accuracy and trust depend on the source.
Assessment time: When the available observations were assessed by the workflow.
Capture time: When the analyst’s evidence record was saved.

Use UTC consistently around incident reviews. Do not substitute capture time for an unknown observation time, or treat an unverified future timestamp as proof of coverage.

Confidence and missing context

The staged AIS explanation uses bounded nearby-vessel context and heuristics. It lacks independent receiver and provider heartbeat telemetry. Current peer positions can differ in coverage from the target’s last-known position.

Qualitative confidence labels are not measured probabilities. A gap does not independently establish intentional shutdown, sanctions evasion, fraud or causation.

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