Evidence Records for Public-Record Changes: Definitional Class Membership as the Certifiable Citation Unit

Abstract

Public records change in ways that matter for later interpretation, yet citing a change precisely is difficult--most consequentially, separating what the change demonstrably is from what it is claimed to mean. Definitional class membership--whether a change matches an objectively checkable predicate--is certifiable: it can be independently verified against the cited source. Importance or review-priority did not certify in our review design: competent reviewers did not converge on it. We introduce the Evidence Record, a deterministic, hash-pinned, claim-bounded primitive that makes a public-record change citable through a record whose integrity any reader can verify, and that carries its definitional class memberships explicitly. Integrity is checkable from the published package alone; deciding most class predicates additionally requires registry state that records identify by hash but do not embed. We implement it in TrialDiff for ClinicalTrials.gov protocol amendments and report both directions of the boundary. On the certifiable side, deterministic event-classes over a fixed, non-random corpus of 100 breast-cancer-related interventional trials yield citable records; a naive "primary endpoint changed after completion" flag fires on 73 patches, but 63 co-occur with results posting and only 10 are clean--a separation made as a checkable definitional predicate, not a validated priority judgment. Two defects found after publication, in opposite directions, were corrected by reissue rather than rewriting. On the uncertifiable side, a derived severity/priority label could not be certified under blinded adversarial review (reviewer confirmations of 4 to 17 of 30 against a pre-registered 24/30 gate) and is released only as uncalibrated metadata. The certifiable citation unit for a public-record change is definitional class membership, not a priority ranking.

11 pages. Dataset: doi:10.5281/zenodo.21811845 (concept doi:10.5281/zenodo.20801956)