Data licensing

Every source in the Kortex graph carries an explicit commercial status; stated here, on the source register, and in the provenance envelope of API responses. Where rights are not yet confirmed, the status says so. We would rather show an honest “under review” than an implied “cleared”.

Production-safe today

201 of 233 exposed sources are production-safe today; their licence question is settled (cleared, derived-only, or licence held) and you can build commercial products on query results drawn from them, subject only to the stated attribution conditions. The remaining 32 sources are under review and are not production-safe until their status changes here.

Policy: raw records from under-review or excluded sources are not served on anonymous public surfaces (the Global Viewer demo layers, homepage demo queries, and static downloads). Enforced 2026-07-03: live vessel (AIS) and aircraft (ADS-B) feeds are key-gated pending the provider-rights audit, and the nuclear-reactor, cable-landing and volcano map layers were withdrawn; each action is recorded in the source notes below. Keyed API responses identify every source they touched in the provenance envelope, so a query that used an under-review source says so explicitly.

Execution modes: the rights position as a control, not just a disclosure

Every envelope-bearing endpoint accepts ?rights_mode=:

Example blocked response:

{"error": {
  "code": "rights_mode_blocked", "status": 409,
  "message": "This calculation draws on sources that are not commercially cleared; rights_mode=commercial_safe fails closed rather than serving them.",
  "details": {"blocking_sources": ["telegeography"],
              "hint": "Re-run with rights_mode=evaluation to receive the answer with full source disclosure, or check /licensing for clearance status."}}}

Status definitions

The matrix

Rendered from the source register at 2026-09-06T05:05:13.581615Z. The same registry drives /sources, /v2/provenance and the per-response provenance envelope.

Attribution

Kortex is built on the work of the open-data community. Sources licensed CC BY, CC BY-SA, or ODbL are credited on every surface where their data appears: the source register, per-entity provenance via /v2/provenance, and the provenance.sources block of API responses. OpenStreetMap-derived layers (via OpenInfraMap) are © OpenStreetMap contributors, under ODbL.

Questions

If you are a data publisher and want to discuss how your data is represented here, or a customer with a licensing question your procurement team needs answered, write to kortex@orkora.com. Corrections are applied to the register directly and propagate to every surface within the hour.

Want to check the rights position against your own queries? A free evaluation API key is issued instantly: 14 days, faceted and insight scope, and every metered answer arrives with its sources and licences disclosed in the envelope.