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Reliable Context
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Perimeter

It runs where your evidence already is.

The material that matters is the material that cannot leave: deal rooms, contracts, case files, internal systems. Reliable Context is installed inside the boundary that already holds them, with one database for your organization, and with the sources, the model routing, the reader clearance and the retention set by you rather than by us.

Request accessHow the product works
Placement
Your infrastructure, inside your existing boundary.
Isolation
One database per organization, with no shared corpus.
Control
Five policies, all of them yours, all of them dated.
A rectilinear pale stone enclosure seen from above, with a single opening in one wall and one cobalt blue block resting at its centre.
One enclosure, one opening, and the thing of value kept inside it. What enters passes a policy you wrote; what leaves carries the evidence behind it.

Architecture

Everything crosses a boundary you drew.

Private sources, licensed feeds and public records enter through the same gate, governed by the same five policies. One database holds the result. Values leave as an export that an auditor can read on its own.

The four guarantees
your infrastructurePrivate sourcescontracts, filings, internal systemsLicensed feedssubscription data under your licencePublic recordsregistries, regulators, publicationspolicies you setSourceswhat may be readModel routingwhich engines see whatReader clearancewho may see which sourceRetentionhow long anything is keptReliable Contextone database per organizationExport: chain of custodyevery value leaves with its source, its excerpt and its datesauditors, regulators,counterparties
Sources enter through policies you set. The kernel holds one database for your organization. Values leave carrying the evidence behind them.

Isolation

One database per organization.

Each organization runs its own database. There is no shared corpus, no pooled index and no cross-customer model of anything. No value on one organization’s record is derived, weighted, ranked or inferred from another organization’s sources, because there is no path by which one could be.

This is a structural property rather than a setting. Two deployments do not share storage, so there is no configuration in which one leaks into the other and none to get wrong. What is shared between deployments is the software, and the software carries no organization’s data in it.

  • Nothing read for one organization is available to another, in any form, including as a statistic or an embedding.
  • A source licensed by one organization is not read on behalf of another, even where both hold a licence to it.
  • A retention policy, a legal hold or a deletion applies to one database and needs no coordination with anyone else’s.
Organization Aits own sourcesits own policiesits own readersone databaseOrganization Bits own sourcesits own policiesits own readersone databaseOrganization Cits own sourcesits own policiesits own readersone databaseno pathno path
Three organizations, three enclosures. The absence of a line between them is the property.
Three separate rectilinear pale concrete enclosures standing well apart on a white surface, each containing a single small cobalt blue block, with nothing connecting them.
The same property photographed. Each enclosure holds one block and there is no route between them, which is what makes the question of leakage between them not arise.

Control

The policies are yours.

Five of them. Each is written once, applies everywhere, is dated when it changes, and is readable from any value it touched. None of them is a preference we hold on your behalf. They correspond to families that security and governance frameworks already name: access control, audit and accountability, and system and information integrity in the NIST control catalogue [1], and the governance of AI systems in the AI risk management framework [2].

How sectors differ
01

Sources

what may be read, under what licence

Which documents, feeds, systems and public sources may be read at all, and the licence each is read under. A source that is not on the list is not read. A source whose licence restricts redistribution is read, and every excerpt taken from it carries that restriction wherever it later surfaces. Adding or removing a source is a dated policy change, so a record can be asked which sources were available to it on a given day.

exampleA subscription dataset may be read for internal briefs, and its excerpts may not leave in a client export.

02

Model routing

which engines may see which material

Which engines may be shown which class of material, written once as a policy rather than settled job by job by whoever happens to be running it. Material is classified, each engine has a ceiling, and an engine is never handed material above its ceiling, including on a retry or a fallback. The routing that applied is recorded with the value, so an export can answer which engines saw the evidence behind a given line.

exampleDeal-room documents are routed only to engines cleared for client-confidential material; public registry pages carry no such restriction.

03

Reader clearance

who may see which source

Who may see which source, and therefore which values. A reader not cleared for a source does not receive the values resting on it. Those values are not silently dropped: they are labelled blocked, attributed to the source and to the policy that withheld them, and shown in place. A restriction and an absence look nothing alike on the surface, because reading the first as the second is how a negative gets invented.

exampleA reviewer sees a value marked blocked, naming the licensed source and the clearance that would open it, instead of an empty cell.

04

Retention and legal hold

how long anything is kept, and what suspends that

How long a retained document and the values read from it are kept, counted from the date each was read, and what happens at expiry. Expiry removes the retained copy and marks every value that rested on it as no longer reproducible, rather than deleting the value and its history. A legal hold suspends expiry for everything in its scope until the hold is lifted, and the hold is itself recorded with its dates.

exampleA seven-year retention on award files, suspended for one supplier from the day a challenge is filed.

05

Audit export

what leaves, and what leaves with it

Every value leaves carrying the sentence it was read from, the document that sentence is in, the locator inside that document, the date the source was read and the date the value entered the record. A declared negative leaves with what was searched and when. An export is reproducible as of its own date, so the file an auditor receives next year is the file that was produced this year.

exampleOne value exports as the block below, and it is read without any access to the system that produced it.

Export

What an auditor receives.

Not a login, not a dashboard, not a report written about the record. One block per value in scope, and a manifest naming the values that were in scope and the date the export reproduces. The block follows the W3C provenance model, which ties a value to the entity, activity and time that produced it [4], and the retention rule follows records-management practice, which treats records as evidence kept for a stated period [3]. An auditor will recognise the idea of evidence as information that supports or contradicts an assertion [5].

one value, as exported

# Halden Therapeutics AG is a fictional demonstration record.
# The shape of the export is not fictional.

record            halden-therapeutics-ag
property          development_phase
value             Phase 2
status            cited
excerpt           "This is a Phase 2, randomised, double-blind study of
                  HLD-204 in adults with moderate to severe disease."
source            ClinicalTrials.gov registry record; retained copy held
locator           NCT06712233, record version 9, Study Description
observed          2026-03-11    # date the source was read
entered           2026-03-11    # date the value entered the record
chosen_over       Phase 1/2, company press release, 14 January 2026
                  not carried: superseded by registry record version 9
reader_clearance  open; no source licence restricts this value

References

References

Frameworks and standards the five policies and the export correspond to. Naming a framework here is a pointer for readers, not a claim of certification or compliance.

  1. [1]

    Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and Organizations

    Joint Task Force, National Institute of Standards and Technology

    NIST Special Publication 800-53, Revision 5, 2020. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.SP.800-53r5

  2. [2]

    Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0)

    National Institute of Standards and Technology

    NIST AI 100-1, 2023. https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.AI.100-1

  3. [3]
  4. [4]

    PROV-DM: The PROV Data Model

    Luc Moreau and Paolo Missier, editors

    W3C Recommendation, 30 April 2013. https://www.w3.org/TR/prov-dm/

  5. [5]

    AS 1105: Audit Evidence

    Public Company Accounting Oversight Board

    PCAOB auditing standard. https://pcaobus.org/oversight/standards/auditing-standards/details/AS1105

Install it against your own sources.

Bring one entity you already argue about internally, and the sources you argue from. The first thing you will see is the export, on your own material, inside your own boundary.

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