Publication Freshness Policy

Freshness and confidence are related but different. Freshness tells you how current the supporting row is relative to expected publication cadence. Confidence tells you how much evidence supports the analytical state of that row.

• A row can be on schedule and still low-confidence.
• A row can be delayed and still mathematically valid as the latest available state.
• A degraded label means the confidence gate prevented a normal-confidence named label, not that the raw files necessarily disappeared.

• updated_through = latest Gold observation date actually available to the Meta calculation
• lag_days_vs_asof_date = publication-time freshness relative to the row date
• lag_days_vs_utc_today = runtime freshness relative to the current UTC date

Public surfaces may display several date fields because publication, source availability, and calculation time are separate concepts. When a page needs one customer-facing as-of date, it should prefer the explicit display date first, then fall back to the latest available data date, and only then to layer-specific dates.

The status page follows this precedence for its displayed as-of value: display_asof, asof.display, asof.latest_available, asof.gold, asof.derived, asof.meta, then Meta fallbacks such as updated_through, regime.asof_date, and date.