Glossary
What is Source lineage?
Verified 21 September 2026
Most reporting is derivative. A wire dispatch is reprinted by dozens of outlets, a press release is run verbatim by the sites that received it, and two publications under one owner may share a newsroom. Counting hosts treats each copy as an independent voice; lineage groups them by origin and by owner, so that seventeen URLs and two genuinely independent origins are recognised as different findings.
Lineage is what makes corroboration meaningful and what makes an evidence record auditable: a reviewer can see not only that a claim appeared in many places but where it entered the record and who repeated it. It is distinct from provenance, which records how a document entered an index; lineage is about how a claim moved between sources.
In unlob, origins and owners are computed when the index is built and surfaced on every ground call as independent_origins, with a confidence on each label.
How unlob handles this: Coverage graph
Common questions
What is Source lineage?
Source lineage traces a reported claim back through the outlets that carried it to the origin that first published it, so that copies are not mistaken for corroboration.
How does Source lineage work in practice?
Lineage is what makes corroboration meaningful and what makes an evidence record auditable: a reviewer can see not only that a claim appeared in many places but where it entered the record and who repeated it. It is distinct from provenance, which records how a document entered an index; lineage is about how a claim moved between sources.
See it working
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