Methodology
How events are discovered, how their sources are recorded, and what each verification status means.
Current status: the Observatory’s initial sample is small and hand-curated. Automated discovery, AI extraction, and an interactive map are part of the intended design and are not yet active. Community submissions currently enter a private curator queue; they are not added to the Observatory unless a curator separately reviews them and enters them through the curator workflow.
Discovery
Automated searches over public sources — web-search queries and RSS/Atom feeds — produce candidate reports. Each candidate is fetched, a snapshot is requested from a web archive, and a short excerpt plus a content hash are stored. A cheap relevance check discards items that are not about a specific real-world automated-driving event.
A single structured AI step then extracts only facts stated explicitly in the source text. Anything not stated is left blank. The AI does not infer causation from involvement, and records a system version only when a version string appears verbatim. The full list of search queries will be published here.
Sources and evidence
Every event links to its sources with publisher, publication date, retrieval date, a live link, an archive link, and the verbatim quote that supports each claim. We store and serve only these excerpts and metadata, not full article text. Please cite the original sources rather than our summary.
What we don’t know
Each event page lists the facts its sources do not establish. Blank fields are shown as unknown, never filled with an estimate.
Involvement is not causation
Recording that an automated vehicle was involved in an event is separate from claiming it caused the event. Causal statements are made only where a source supports them, and are labelled as claims with their own verification status.
Verification status
Every event carries one status. The status is stated in words; any colour used with it elsewhere is a secondary cue only, and the status is understandable without it.
- AI-discovered · Unverified
- Found by automated discovery and summarised by AI. Not yet checked by a curator. The linked sources are the evidence; the summary is not.
- Community-submitted · Unverified
- Sent in through the public form. Community submissions currently go to a private curator queue and are not shown in the Observatory; an event is added only if a curator separately reviews the submission and enters it through the curator workflow.
- Curator-reviewed
- A curator has checked the record against its sources and corrected it where needed. This is not an assertion that every detail is true.
- Verified
- A curator judges that the core facts are supported by strong sources.
- Disputed
- The sources conflict with each other on a material point.
Records merged into another event redirect to it. Records that are rejected leave the public listing, with a stated reason.
Selection bias
A catalogue built from news and regulator reporting is a convenience sample, weighted toward what gets reported. To reduce a failure-only skew, discovery also searches for the successful handling of difficult situations, and the distribution of outcomes is shown rather than hidden.
See About for the project’s purpose and scope.