What AgricultureID means by verified, partial and not yet indexed

Every coverage cell on AgricultureID carries one of six labels. They look like degrees of the same thing and they are not — five of them describe an absence, and the differences between those five are the whole point.

Verified

The corpus holds records for this layer in this jurisdiction, and the official source behind them is known, reachable and recorded. This is a claim about evidence, not about completeness: verified does not mean exhaustive.

Partial

Records exist, and they do not cover the independent target for this set. The important word is independent. Coverage of United States agricultural authorities is measured against the fifty states — a list that exists outside the corpus — not against the states AgricultureID happens to hold. Measuring against your own data always yields 100%.

Researched, source inaccessible

Somebody looked, found the official source, and could not read it: a 403, a DNS failure, a refused connection, a login wall. The thing exists. We cannot get at it. Twenty-six subnational agricultural authorities sit in this state, and they are deferred on access, not on evidence.

Researched, source not ingestible

Somebody looked, reached the source, and found it publishes nothing that can be ingested without guessing. A register that lists product names with no identifiers, a PDF whose table structure bleeds rows together. Reaching a source is not the same as being able to use it.

Not researched

Nobody has looked. This is the commonest honest answer in any young data layer, and it says nothing whatsoever about whether the thing exists. Treating it as "there is none" is the single most common misreading of any coverage map, including ours.

Not applicable

The subject does not arise here for a stated, recorded structural reason — and the reason is recorded, so the label cannot be used as a quiet synonym for "we gave up".

Why not just one word

Because a reader deciding whether to trust a gap needs to know which kind it is. "No pesticide register recorded for this country" is compatible with: the country has none; the country has one and nobody has looked; the country has one and it returns 403 to every request; and the country has one that publishes only scanned images. Those four situations call for four different next actions.

Collapsing them into "missing" would make the map tidier and would delete the only part of it that is useful.

The rule underneath all six

Absence in AgricultureID is always a statement about AgricultureID. Every coverage page says so in those words. A layer shown as not yet indexed means nobody has looked — and never that the thing is absent in the world.