No single source holds the whole picture.
A place appears in a register, an organisation’s system and a published report. Each source holds part of the picture. Spine is designed to make those parts discoverable across participating systems, under their holders’ terms.
This example brings public records into a shared catalogue. Explore the subjects, follow the sources and distinguish a matching name from an independently supported claim.
Different sources can inform the same question.
A mining record in context.
Mine sites and licence areas connect to the organisations, documents and activities around them. This example draws on a saved cross-section of that catalogue, every entry keeping the source that recorded it.
Follow an organisation through the sources that name it.
Take LBMA. It arrives once, in one source, as a line of text. Pull on that line and the catalogue gives back the programme it runs, the work it published and the meeting it convened, each with its own date and its own origin. That is what putting sources together buys: not more rows, but a party you can actually see.
The connections above are drawn by matching this party’s own name against the fields where other entries name a party for real, which is a reading of what the catalogue says rather than a relationship anyone has verified. Where it holds an independently extracted reference, that is counted separately and marked with the ring.
Explore places, organisations and the evidence around them.
Public-data example. Search a saved extract from the catalogue. This page does not query participating systems in real time or transfer private records. People named in public registers are pseudonymised.
Every place the catalogue can put on the ground, filtered by what is dug there or by what a second source confirms.
Licence areas the data gives no boundary stay off the markers, many of them applications for an artisanal licence rather than working ground. They are counted, never drawn as a site.
See what supports each claim.
The source breakdown below shows where this snapshot’s records came from. Large imports make more subjects discoverable, but a record from one source and a claim checked against an independent source carry different kinds of evidence.
Only a small minority of parties carry an independently extracted document reference. Nearly all of those come from DAAC’s own crawl, and none from the parties imported from the government register. A second source adds evidence to assess; agreement alone does not establish truth.
Every entry names the source that published or recorded it, and the cards below print those sources as the records hold them. Most entries came to this catalogue straight from the register or report that published them. A smaller set arrived through DAAC’s own gold reference hub, which finds, checks and renders what it collects into the same shape as the rest.
The locations alone carry cassiterite, coltan, diamond, copper, cobalt and wolframite sites alongside gold. Gold is where the crawl has gone deepest. It is not where the catalogue stops.
Finding information does not grant access to it.
Spine distinguishes who may discover a record from who may access its contents. Everything in this extract is public-source material, published openly and saved here as a fixed cross-section, so discovery is the whole of what it asks for.
This example demonstrates discovery.
Everything here is public-source material, saved as a fixed extract of the catalogue. What this page does is search and source inspection: find a subject, then see what stands behind it and where each part came from.
The protocol distinguishes discovery, access and acquisition. A working connection must implement and verify those conditions before restricted information can move.
What would you need to find?
Tell us which organisations, places or activities matter to your work, and what information you already hold. We can discuss the relevant public sources and what a connection to your own system would require.
Investors and mineral buyers weighing a counterparty. Refiners and their auditors checking where a consignment starts. Lenders and programme funders working in places where the answer is normally unavailable. Anyone who needs a question about a complicated geography answered from more than one source at a time.