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Contents

Open Professional
Professional methodology
What Vigil Professional is

Chapter 02

How it works

Professional holds no copy of anything. Every surface composes the same canonical records — which is why your saved work stays correct, and why nothing you do in it can move an assessment.

Public Vigil and Professional

They are one body of work with two ways of using it.

Public Vigil publishes the research: modules, weekly briefs, Analytical Notes, standing Watch questions, actor and location records, maps and search. It is free, needs no account, and nothing in it moves behind a payment.

Professional adds two things on top of that corpus. Depth — observable-level records beneath every public question, and the dated evidence beneath those. And instruments — surfaces for monitoring, tracing, comparing, testing a condition, producing a briefing, and keeping what you did.

One record, many surfaces

A single canonical record is read by everything. The same Watch question appears in Monitor as a row in the cycle, in Research as a result and a chain, in Compare as a column, in a Scenario as a cited basis, and in the Brief Builder as a block — and in all five it is the same record, resolved at the moment you look at it.

  1. Canonical record

    A Watch question, an observable, an event, an actor, a location, a source — published, dated, with a page of its own.

    Editorial. Maintained on the weekly cycle.

  2. Derived surface

    Monitor, Research, Evidence, Compare, Scenario Lab, Timeline, Brief Builder. Each composes the record; none copies it.

    Composition, never duplication.

  3. Your saved work

    A collection, a query, a comparison, a run, a timeline, a brief. Each holds references to records.

    Yours. Private to your account.

Read left to right, nothing is ever copied. That is the whole architecture, and every behaviour in the next paragraph follows from it.

Four consequences you will meet in ordinary use:

  • A correction reaches you. When a record is corrected, the collection, timeline and brief that reference it show the corrected wording next time they are opened. You are never left holding a stale copy that still looks right.
  • A retirement is visible. If a record is retired, saved work that points at it says no longer published rather than quietly showing something that has stopped being true.
  • Nothing you do changes an assessment. Following a question does not make it reviewed more attentively; holding an assumption does not alter a record; annotating a block does not edit it.
  • The figures agree everywhere. A count on one surface and the same count on another come from the same resolver, so two surfaces cannot disagree about the corpus.

The chain beneath a reading

Everything Professional asserts sits on a chain you can walk. It is four links, and each is a record with an address.

  1. Watch question

    A standing question whose answer could materially change an assessment.

    Public. Anyone can read it.

  2. Observable

    What is being checked, where it stands, what would move it, what it cannot establish.

    Professional.

  3. Evidence entry

    A dated line naming the canonical development, event, Note or brief it rests on, and which way it bears.

    Directions never sum.

  4. Source

    The registry entry the basis cites, with its type and every place it is used.

    A citation count is a count.

Across the corpus: 306 observable records, 586 dated evidence entries, 149 registry sources cited at least once.
The evidence chain for one observable record: question — “Is the Strait of Hormuz commercially usable again?”; observables — six records that check it; this record — the reading that no war-risk cover is being written on terms charterers take up; sources — four registry entries it cites.
The chain as the product draws it, for one record. Selecting a result in Research fills this panel without leaving the page.

The five working surfaces

They are used in an order, and the order is worth learning once because everything else in the product hangs off it.

  1. Monitor

    What moved this cycle and what was checked and held, over the module’s geography and recorded activity.

  2. Research

    Query the corpus, select a record, read the chain beneath it and what it connects to.

  3. Analyse

    Compare two records, or hold a condition and read the record at it.

  4. Produce

    Assemble a briefing from canonical blocks and export it with its citations.

  5. Return

    My Vigil and the Library. Everything saved, still pointing at live records.

Each has a chapter. The supporting instruments — lenses, the Timeline, the Tempo Lab — are ways into one of these rather than a sixth thing.

What “maintained” means

The corpus is reviewed on a stated weekly cycle. A review that finds nothing is recorded as a review, with its date and its basis — because an unchanged reading nobody checked and an unchanged reading somebody checked are different things, and the product keeps them apart everywhere.

  1. Weekly review

    Every published module is reviewed and receives a dated brief, including the weeks when the finding is that nothing moved.

  2. Canonical update

    Questions, observables, events, profiles and series are written, corrected, extended or retired.

  3. Surfaces follow

    Monitor, Research, Evidence and Tempo show the new state the next time they are opened. Nothing is cached against you.

  4. Your work follows

    Saved references resolve against the updated records; anything retired says so.

6 modules on the cycle. What each record family is and how it is graded is set out in the public methodology.

What this is notNot a feed, not a data service and not a model. Nothing in Professional is generated, inferred or scored. Every sentence a subscriber reads was written by an editor against evidence, or is a count of records — and the surfaces say which.

The rules that bind all of it are public: the Vigil methodology governs the corpus, and Method in use in this Handbook explains what each label means when you meet it on a screen.