Lexicon · Ontology as economic infrastructure
Evidence
Fully specified name: Evidence (concept)
Information used to support or challenge a particular claim.
- Scope note
- Strength and relevance depend on the question and study context.
- Synonyms
- None recorded as true synonyms in this context.
- Monograph
- Provenance and evidence (planned; brief only)
- External mappings
- None recorded. In W0 no mapping to SNOMED CT® or any external authority is asserted for this entry. A future mapping record will carry source system, identifier, version, relation type, evidence, author, confidence where meaningful, and review state.
- Formal status
- Editorial entry only. It is not part of any released ontology and a prose edit here changes no formal definition.
Draft. This entry is an unreviewed draft. Its sources have not been checked by a named person and no domain reviewer has approved it. Treat every claim as provisional.
Notes
Evidence is whatever is offered in support of, or against, a specific claim: a measurement, a study, a specification, a primary text, an expert's recorded judgment. Two properties govern its usefulness and they are independent. Strength concerns how well the evidence, taken on its own terms, establishes what it reports: sample size, method, replication, risk of bias. Relevance concerns whether what it reports bears on the claim at hand: the right population, the right system, the right conditions. A precise binding measurement in a purified protein preparation is strong evidence about that preparation and may be weak evidence about retention in a patient's tumor.
The word carries different conventions in different fields. Clinical medicine has formal evidence hierarchies and grading systems that rank study designs. Gene annotation uses evidence codes that record how an assertion was obtained (experimental, computational, author statement). Philosophy asks what makes anything count as evidence at all, which is the concern of Epistemology. NucLex uses the word in the plain sense and asks every substantive claim in an essay or monograph to be paired with the source that supports it, the location in that source, and any limitation.
Evidence is not Provenance: evidence supports a claim, provenance traces a record. And an evidence packet assembled by an automated tool is not an accepted claim; the entry on Human review explains why it remains a proposal until a person has judged it.