“Help me understand what is near a place I care about.”
Resolve the place, show distance and direction, separate weather from incidents, and link the originating record.
Inside Auburn Globe
Wildfire intelligence should show its work.
Auburn Globe is a place-first evidence product: it resolves the place, keeps source records distinct, reconciles incident identity conservatively, and makes uncertainty visible beside every conclusion.
01 · Vision + people
Start with the place someone cares about.
Regional outlooks matter. In the moment, people still ask a more concrete question: what current, source-backed evidence exists near this place, and how sure are we?
“Show me what materially changed since I last looked.”
Preserve stable place and incident identities, keep a dated snapshot, and require a human acknowledgment.
“Help me prepare a clear, bounded handoff.”
Attach ownership, checklist state, factual notes, and source links without pretending Auburn is an incident command system.
Product principles
Six rules shape every surface.
- 01Truth before urgency
Escalate only from accepted current evidence; never use dramatic language to fill a data gap.
- 02Place before region
Resolve the user’s exact place and state the radius, coverage, and jurisdiction before drawing a conclusion.
- 03Claims stay traceable
Publisher, record, source URL, time, geography, transformation, validation, and expiry travel with the claim.
- 04Identity is conservative
Names alone do not merge incidents. Spatial, temporal, and authority evidence must agree.
- 05Failure is a first-class state
Empty, partial, stale, conflicting, unavailable, and unsupported outcomes remain visibly different.
- 06Attention belongs to people
Automation organizes evidence; consequential interpretation and action remain human responsibilities.
02 · Architecture
A bounded path from source record to product claim.
- 01Source adapters
Request geocoding, thermal detections, incident records, weather, wind, and fire-weather outlooks independently.
- 02Validation gates
Apply schema, coordinate, geographic, time, unit, and source-specific freshness rules before accepting a record.
- 03Identity engine
Link records conservatively, preserve conflicts, compute place relationships, and keep source-native records intact.
- 04Threat report
Assemble the seven-level evidence state, independent truth state, timeline, proximity bands, forecasts, and claim ledger.
- 05Product surfaces
Render the place report, incident history, Watchtower, Reliability, and device-local Operations without changing the evidence beneath them.
Server evidence history
Canonical incidents, source versions, claims, identity decisions, material events, place relationships, and source-health observations use append-only history where supported.
Device-local attention state
Watchtower order, names, acknowledgments, Operations assignments, notes, checklists, and handoffs stay in the current browser. No account or remote notification delivery is claimed.
03 · Incident model
One incident can have many records. The relationship to a place is separate.
Auburn keeps provider records immutable, builds a canonical identity only when linkage rules pass, and computes distance, bearing, and nearby thermal association for the selected place.
What a publisher said
Native record ID, name, status, area, time, location or geometry, source URL, and retrieved version.
What Auburn can reconcile
Stable identity, aliases, confidence dimensions, accepted fields, source set, conflicts, first and last observation, and expiry.
What is true for this place
Distance, bearing, proximity band, thermal association, and observation history—never stored as an intrinsic incident fact.
Linkage boundary
Authoritative record IDs can anchor identity. Cross-source candidates still need spatial agreement; fuzzy names require tight distance and time agreement. Transitive “bridge” matches do not silently pull unrelated records into one group.
04 · Threat state
Severity and truth are separate axes.
The evidence ladder answers what level of current evidence is established. The truth state answers how complete, current, consistent, and supported the underlying lanes are.
- 01No current evidence / indeterminate
No accepted current evidence was established, or coverage was too incomplete to determine it.
- 02Conditions elevated
Current fire-weather evidence crosses a defined concern threshold without establishing a nearby incident.
- 03Nearby thermal activity
Current satellite detections are near the place; a thermal anomaly is not automatically an incident.
- 04Candidate incident
A current source record indicates a possible nearby incident but does not meet verified-incident rules.
- 05Verified nearby incident
A current authoritative record or qualifying corroboration establishes a nearby incident identity.
- 06Official warning or closure
A current source-backed warning, closure, or confinement action is attached to the place report.
- 07Official evacuation action
A current source-backed evacuation action is attached to the place report.
05 · Failure taxonomy
A blank answer is not a safe answer.
A request completed, validated, and returned no accepted records for its stated scope.
Some useful evidence arrived, but a lane, field, geography, or time window is incomplete.
A previously validated result remains visible with its date, but it is outside the current-use window.
The request, provider, schema, network, or storage path did not produce valid evidence.
A source or claim is not implemented for the requested geography or function.
Accepted sources disagree on a material identity, location, area, or status field.
06 · Evidence governance
Every material claim carries a receipt.
The evidence ledger exists so a reader can inspect how Auburn moved from a source value to a displayed conclusion without reverse-engineering the interface.
- Publisher + source
- Named publisher, dataset identity, record key where available, and canonical source URL.
- Three clocks
- Publication time, effective or observed time, and Auburn retrieval time remain distinct.
- Geographic scope
- The jurisdiction, bounding area, selected place, or source-defined coverage attached to the claim.
- Transformation
- Original value, normalization, linkage, unit conversion, distance calculation, or classification step.
- Validation + conflict
- Accepted, qualified, conflicting, unavailable, or unsupported status with material disagreement preserved.
- Expiry
- A source-specific rule and timestamp determine when a record stops supporting a current claim.
07 · Release method
A release is a chain of evidence too.
- 01Govern the input
Version contracts, schemas, source policy, evidence fixtures, and release identity.
- 02Prove the core
Run deterministic identity, truth, proximity, antimeridian, change-fingerprint, and source-health tests alongside inherited regression suites.
- 03Inspect the experience
Check responsive layouts, keyboard paths, live states, content boundaries, and representative end-to-end workflows.
- 04Verify the release
Build the production artifact, apply data migrations, confirm the published version independently, and record what changed.
- 05Prove recovery
Create a checksummed recovery bundle, restore it in a clean environment, and document secrets and external dependencies without storing credentials.
08 · Accessibility
Clarity is operational reliability.
- Semantic landmarks, ordered headings, descriptive labels, and real tables where relationships are tabular.
- Keyboard-operable search, filters, dialogs, checklists, links, and 44-pixel minimum interactive targets.
- Visible focus, high-contrast text, reduced-motion behavior, and state communicated with words—not color alone.
- Loading, empty, degraded, and error states announced without replacing dated evidence or moving focus unexpectedly.
- Plain-language explanations beside domain terms, source timestamps, and every high-consequence boundary.
09 · Deliberate tradeoffs
What Auburn chooses not to do.
A composite score would hide which evidence lane caused a change. Auburn keeps severity, truth, proximity, weather, wind, and official action inspectable.
Similar labels occur across jurisdictions and seasons. Spatial, temporal, and authority agreement protect identity.
Official-action coverage is jurisdiction-specific. Unsupported coverage stays unsupported, even when incident evidence is strong.
Yesterday’s valid record can remain useful history, but it cannot keep supporting a current claim after its expiry rule.
Device-local state keeps the product lightweight and private, at the cost of cross-device synchronization and remote notifications.
Operations helps organize review and handoff. Dispatch, warnings, access control, and infrastructure actuation remain outside Auburn.
10 · Success measures
Measure understanding, not attention.
Auburn is successful when people can reach a defensible place conclusion quickly, inspect why it is true, and recognize when the system does not know.
- Time to grounded answer
Can a reader move from place search to current evidence, source scope, and next authoritative link without detours?
- Claim explainability
Can the reader trace each material statement through source, time, transformation, validation, and expiry?
- False-empty prevention
Do unavailable or malformed inputs remain distinct from a successfully checked-empty response?
- Identity stability
Do repeated observations preserve the right incident while resisting weak or transitive matches?
- Inclusive completion
Can keyboard, touch, and assistive-technology users complete the core workflows and understand state without relying on color?
11 · Known limitations
The boundary is part of the answer.
Live sources have different coverage, cadence, licenses, schemas, and failure modes. Auburn does not continuously monitor every provider.
Satellite thermal detections can reflect industrial heat, agricultural burning, or other anomalies; they do not independently establish an operational incident.
Point locations, perimeters, status, and area can change. Distance to a point is not distance to every edge of a fire.
Official warnings, closures, and evacuation actions are not globally integrated. Missing coverage does not mean no action exists.
Watchtower and Operations state is browser-local. Clearing site data or changing devices can remove it, and no remote alert delivery is claimed.
Weather and fire-danger outlooks describe modeled conditions, not structure-level impact, safe travel, evacuation timing, or personal safety advice.
The governed 2026 regional outlook is a separate research layer; it is not substituted for current place-level evidence.
12 · Roadmap
Broaden coverage without weakening the contract.
- NowDeepen incident history
Use repeated place relationships to show carefully qualified distance and status trends only when the observation history supports them.
- NextExpand official-action connectors
Add jurisdiction-specific warning, closure, and evacuation sources after authority, license, schema, freshness, and failure behavior are governed.
- NextPortable local workflows
Design explicit Watchtower and Operations export/import with validation, versioning, and clear privacy boundaries.
- ExploreAccessible notifications
Consider opt-in delivery only after continuous monitoring, deduplication, escalation, quiet-hour, and failure-disclosure expectations can be met.
- ExploreLanguage and jurisdiction context
Localize explanations and authority pathways without flattening local terminology or overstating geographic support.
Auburn Globe