Atlas Commons publishes numbers for decisions where being wrong is expensive. So every figure carries where it came from and what kind of claim it is — and you can check any of them against the original federal source. This page is the standard, the sources, and the three steps. If a number can't be verified, it shouldn't be cited — including ours.
The same number can be a logged fact, a government model, our arithmetic, or our reading. Conflating those is how data misleads. Every figure on every page is tagged as exactly one of these, in the page and in its machine-readable data, so you always know the warrant behind it.
A counted event or reported figure that actually occurred. Highest warrant.
e.g. NOAA logged 153 direct storm deaths in Texas in 2025.A model, score, or projection an agency publishes — not a measurement. Verifiable, but a prediction, not a fact of the world.
e.g. FEMA's National Risk Index composite score.An in-house rank, ratio, or aggregate over sourced figures. The inputs are cited; the math is stated and reproducible.
e.g. a state's rank among the 51 on recorded storm deaths.Framing, context, or a boundary note. The lowest-warrant claim — labeled so you can take it or leave it.
e.g. "dollars say drought, lives say flooding."Take a real figure from a live page and check it yourself against the primary source. If it doesn't match NOAA, the page is wrong — and you should be able to prove it in two minutes.
RECORDED "In 2025, NOAA logged 153 direct storm deaths in Texas; the deadliest force was flash flooding (144 deaths)."
Follow this number all the way down — three clickable links, no homework on faith.
"status": "recorded",
"value": "Flash Flood: 144 deaths / ...",
"source": "NOAA NCEI Storm Events Database",
"sourceUrl": "https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/"No atlas invents data. Each is an aggregation and structuring of named public sources. Here is the primary authority behind every atlas; follow the link to the original.
| Atlas | Domain | Primary source(s) of record |
|---|---|---|
| Coverage | ACA insurance | CMS Marketplace Public Use Files (QHP plans, benefits, rates) |
| Care | Hospital & provider quality | CMS Care Compare (hospital, home-health, nursing-home quality) |
| Finance | Consumer finance | HMDA (CFPB), CFPB Complaints, FDIC, GLEIF |
| Justice | Civil legal | State statutes of limitations (primary law), Legal Services Corporation, FJC Integrated Database |
| Property | Home & natural-hazard risk | FEMA National Risk Index, NOAA Storm Events, USFS Wildfire Risk, U.S. Treasury FIO / NAIC |
| Compliance | Business / counterparty | GLEIF (Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation) |
| Singulariki | Work & labor | BLS OEWS, O*NET (federal), Anthropic Economic Index (non-government — labeled as such where used) |
Coverage is the 30 federally-facilitated-marketplace states; states running their own exchanges (CA, NY, and others) are labeled as state-based exchanges, never as zero.
The operating discipline behind every label — not a promise to take on faith, but the thing the verification above lets you enforce: a figure's status is fixed by its source, and it is never upgraded to make a number look stronger than its warrant. A recorded fact stays recorded; a model is never relabeled as a measurement; our own arithmetic is marked derived, not dressed up as data. The point of this page is that you don't have to believe that — every number links to the authority that can confirm or refute it. A figure you can't independently verify is treated as not yet true, and we hold our own numbers to that line first. (Atlas Commons is early and single-operator; this is the standard it's built to, stated honestly, not a claim of external audit.)
Atlas Commons informs and compares at the grain its sources support. It is not a verdict on a specific person, property, provider, or case; not a substitute for a licensed professional where one is required (clinical, legal, insurance); and not a forecast. Where a figure is missing, it is shown as missing — never estimated to fill a gap. Known limits are named on the page that carries them, not buried.
For agents. This standard is machine-readable. The structured
version of this page — the four statuses, the source-of-record table, and the verification protocol — is at
/trust.json, and embedded as JSON-LD in this page's head. Every entity page across the atlases also
serves a .jsonld alternate with each figure's source, value, and status. Cite accordingly.