Ore, metal, obsidian

A fact record is not a pile of articles. Articles are ore: thousands of publishing domains in dozens of languages, open data feeds, chain readings, filings, all arriving around the clock, all repeating one another, all mixing what happened with what somebody said happened. Ore is heavy, most of it is rock, and nobody should be handed it as a product.

The foundry exists to do something to the ore. This is what it does, stage by stage, and what comes out at the end.

Ore

Intake is signed at the moment it happens. A fetch of a feed, a read of a register, a block from a chain: each one carries a receipt naming the instrument that read it and the time. Nothing is trusted yet; everything is on the record. That matters later, because the metal can only be traced to ore that was itself recorded.

The fire

The refinery folds and distills. Duplicates collapse across URL, content hash and title, so syndication is one origin, not twenty. Statements are distilled from the text into claims: a subject, a predicate, a figure, a date. Each claim is counted by distinct publishers, first seen and last seen, and read against the instruments that witness the subjects it names. When publishers agree, the claim is corroborated. When they disagree on a number, it runs as SOURCES DIFFER with the disagreement named.

Everything that leaves the fire keeps its lineage: which ore, which fetch, which receipt. The refinery adds no facts of its own; it only reduces what was gathered.

Metal

What pours out is the fact: an identity, a version chain, and a receipt on every hop. A fact is never edited and never deleted. When the world moves, the fact is superseded and the old version stays, dated. When a challenge stands, the redaction is filed with its reason and stays visible forever. This is the material every DRM3 surface is built from: a search answer, a paper's story, an alert, a data pack. None of them paraphrase someone else's prose; they are cast from the metal.

Obsidian

The seal is the last stage and the one people notice first. Every fact, every story and every answer is signed with a key published in a registry and anchored on a chain. The seal does not make the metal pure; it makes it checkable. Anyone can re-hash the bytes, compare the signature, walk the chain back to the ore, and see exactly what the foundry knew and when.

Facts are the metal. Provenance is the obsidian seal. The foundry's promise is not that the metal is flawless; it is that you can see how it was made, and that nothing about that record can be changed behind your back.