Reconciliation layer
Make the evidence comparable before asking what it means.
Creator data comes from platforms with different reporting windows, metric semantics, identities, permissions, thresholds, and failure modes. WITNESS reconciles those differences before combining the evidence.
Identity
Confirm that signals refer to the same creator, account, work, release, campaign, or entity before comparison.
Time
Align reporting windows, timezone boundaries, delayed reporting, and provisional periods.
Meaning
Do not assume similarly named metrics represent the same event, denominator, or population.
Units
Normalize counts, rates, percentages, durations, currency, and scale only where normalization is justified.
Provenance
Preserve which provider, connection, report, or public observation produced the evidence.
Constraints
Keep thresholds, unavailable data, permissions, review gates, deprecations, and provider-specific limitations visible.
Missing is not zero.
A provider may omit recent reporting days, threshold results, deny a metric under the current permission set, or return no data for a resource that is unavailable. WITNESS should preserve those states rather than flattening them into a numeric zero.
Reconciliation protects downstream reasoning.
If the evidence layer silently merges incomparable measurements, even a sophisticated reasoning model can produce a precise but unjustified conclusion. WITNESS treats reconciliation as a deterministic prerequisite for cross-source interpretation.