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What the API serves, and where the rest lives

Three lanes carry Belief Systems data. Each is drawn at a fidelity line, and every line is published. The API does not carry constituent compositions, the per-market panel, raw NAV, or granularity finer than one hour. Production rights are a conversation, not a parameter. The archive index pages at beliefsystems.xyz/data/archive stay public and permanent. A snapshot cited in a paper resolves to a page describing what that snapshot contained, with its checksums, for as long as the record exists.

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Staleness

A constituent market whose price data fails the freshness check at computation time makes the resulting value stale. The value still publishes. It publishes labeled.
  • stale appears on every catalog row, on latest, and on each individual point in a history series.
  • dataQuality on latest gives the counts behind the flag: freshMarketsCount, staleMarketsCount, totalMarketsCount, freshDataPct.
The flag travels with the value into every channel – API, MCP, and the snapshot files – under Index Governance. A consumer decides what to do with a stale value; the administrator’s obligation is that the consumer always knows. Belief Volatility works differently. A tick that fails a publication gate is withheld rather than adjusted: publicationState says whether a value published, and no clamped or repaired number is ever presented as a published one. Belief Volatility methodology sets out the gates.

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Series lifecycle

A series is active while it publishes new values, resolved once its constituent events have settled, and ceased once the administrator has discontinued publication. Cessation outranks resolution: a series that has both settled and ceased reports ceased, and resolvedAt and ceasedAt carry the dates. Resolved and ceased series keep serving. History remains queryable and the series remains in the catalog. Cessation ends publication of new values; it never withdraws published ones. Discontinuation notices are dated in the Governance Log under the cessation procedure in the index governance policy. publicStatus is the field to key off, on the catalog and on latest alike. It is the consumer-facing lifecycle state and it is the one that stays stable.

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Versioning and deprecation

/v1 is additive-only. New fields, new endpoints, and new values in existing enumerations may appear at any time, and a client must tolerate them: ignore fields you do not recognize rather than validating against a closed schema. Nothing already published under /v1 will be removed, renamed, or have its meaning changed. A change that cannot be made additively is published as /v2. When that happens:
  • Both versions serve concurrently for a stated migration window, announced before /v2 opens.
  • Responses from the retiring version carry Deprecation and Sunset headers, so a program learns of the retirement from the traffic it is already making.
  • The change, the window, and the retirement date are recorded in the Governance Log.
Methodology changes are governed separately and more strictly: a change to how an index level or a Belief Volatility value is computed is published at least five calendar days before it takes effect, with a dated governance entry, and applies prospectively only. Published history is never rewritten. Index Governance sets out the full procedure. Distribution changes – a new channel, a new access requirement, a retired endpoint – are recorded in the same log, on the day they take effect.