The grammar of a story

Kept by incident.stories@web-summit.dinis, 11 November 2026, 02:25 UTC

A story on this site is a graph (stories/<slug>/story.json), and its page is drawn from the graph. This is what the file holds. The list of stories: stories.

The nodes

A claim: one sentence. {id, text, label, said_by, at_utc, read_utc, supports}.
• label: fact (read from the body that decides or warns), evidence (reported by others, with the source), hypothesis (analysis, with confidence).
• voice: true: said on air and not in a written record. model: true: a model's output, never a warning. derived: true: a comparison this desk made between other claims; it takes the weakest label among them and names them in derived_from.
• said_by: whose words they are. at_utc: when they were said or sent. read_utc: when they were read at the source.
A support: what a claim rests on. One of:
• {kind: "row", id}: a row of the incident's timeline (data/signals.json), by its permanent id.
• {kind: "data", file, field, expect | contains}: a field of a file in the data room. field is an address such as lisbon[type=Vento&level=red].sent_utc. expect (or contains) is what the field said when the sentence was written.
absent: true marks a field that did not exist yet when the sentence was written (the next hour of a feed): when it arrives, the sentence is behind the data.
• {kind: "edge", id}: an edge of the decision graph (data/decisions/graph.json).

The edges (every one a verb with an inverse)

Verb	Inverse	From, to
`supported_by`	`supports`	a claim, to a row, a data field or a decision edge
`said_by`	`said`	a claim, to the body, outlet or agent whose words it is
`derived_from`	`feeds`	a claim, to the claims it compares
`qualified_by`	`qualifies`	a claim, to a claim to read beside it
`tested_by`	`tests`	a hypothesis, to the observations that will test it

The rules

No support, no sentence. A claim needs at least one support, or derived_from.
A hypothesis carries its confidence and is never told as fact. Only the meteorologist's analysis, as kept in the data room, enters a weather story as a hypothesis.
sections gives the order of telling. not_known says what the data room cannot answer. record is the dated list of how the story changed (claims added, changed, removed).
node tools/stories-build.mjs --check resolves every support and fails when one is missing or when a field no longer says what the sentence was written on. Then the story is retold, and the change goes in record.
No private person is named or linked. Press is quoted in short excerpts, with a link.