Coverage and claim rules

Every load-bearing statement on this site traces to a cited source with a date. This page states exactly what the Factbook claims to cover, what its statuses mean, and where its limits are.

Coverage universe

The Factbook covers the rare earths → permanent magnets chain across: United States, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, EU/EEA, Japan, South Korea.

The completeness claim is scoped to a named-source manifest, not to the world. A facility belongs in the Atlas when it appears in one of the named sources below and is at separation stage or later; mining and concentration projects qualify only when a named source records national-government involvement (an award, loan, equity stake, offtake, or lease). "Complete" means every manifest entry has a record. Facilities the named sources miss are welcome additions, but their absence is not an error in the completeness claim.

Manifest dated Aug 11, 2026: 48 expected facilities (45 separation-or-later, 3 government-involved mining) drawn from 32 named sources.

Documented exclusions (checked, deliberately not listed) are recorded in the manifest itself — for example, mining projects whose reported government support could not be confirmed on an official URL, and facilities named only in secondary sources.

Deposit records

Deposit records follow different rules from facility records: they are imported deterministically from USGS datasets, not hand-curated. Sources: Rare Earth Element Occurrences in the United States (USMIN, ver. 4.0, June 2019, doi:10.5066/F7FN15D1) for known sites, and the Earth MRI focus areas release (ver. 2.0, April 2024) for areas under active federal mapping. Both are US government works in the public domain.

Three caveats. First, an occurrence is a documented presence of rare earth minerals — most occurrences will never become mines. Second, resource estimates on deposit pages are as compiled by USGS from the cited studies, with their original dates and resource classes; they are not current company reserve statements. Third, the USMIN compilation is dated June 2019 — projects that advanced after that date are covered by facility records, which are hand-curated and kept current. Where a tracked facility sits on a USMIN deposit, the two records link to each other.

Provenance model

Records carry two kinds of dated statements. Immutable events record things that happened — a status change, a financial commitment, an opportunity transition. They are never edited or deleted; current state is derived from the event ledger. Versioned claims record current assertions — a capacity, an ownership, a material flow. A claim is superseded only by a newer claim that names it; the old claim remains in the record's history.

Every load-bearing statement carries: a source (URL, publisher, publication date, retrieval date, and an archive link or an explicit note of why none exists), an evidence locator (page, section, or table for multi-page documents), an as_of date (when it was true), a verified_at date (when a curator last confirmed it), and a confidence grade:

• confirmed — stated by a government source or by the subject organization about its own actions;
• reported — stated by press or third parties; not independently confirmed on a primary source;
• inferred — a mapping or attribution the curators made (for example, assigning an unstated product form to the nearest material in our vocabulary). Every inference says so.

Page freshness is the oldest verified_at among a record's active claims — a page cannot look fresh because one field was recently touched. Historical events never refresh a page.

Status semantics

Facilities are modeled as production lines, each with its own status history (announced, permitted, financed, under construction, commissioned, operating, idled, restarted, cancelled). One site can legitimately show an operating line beside one under construction. "Operating" requires a source stating production — an opening ceremony is "commissioned."

Federal instruments use a financial event ladder: announced (including letters of interest), conditional-commitment (approved but conditions unmet — no funds flow), definitive-agreement (executed documents), obligated (funds committed), disbursed (funds moved, recorded per tranche). A conditional loan commitment is not financing; the Factbook never upgrades a state beyond what the source states.

Opportunities follow forecast → NOI → open → closed → selected → awarded (or cancelled/archived). Amendments, Q&A postings, and deadline changes are recorded as events but do not change lifecycle state. Open-state opportunities are re-verified against the live system within seven days; the verification date is shown. Monitored systems: SAM.gov, DOE eXCHANGE, ARPA-E eXCHANGE, Grants.gov, the DLA BAA, and DIBC. Completeness for opportunities means complete within those six systems.

Date conventions

• When a source states only a month, the record uses the first of that month with the imprecision noted.
• Japanese fiscal-year-only grant decisions use the fiscal year start (April 1) with date_basis: announced, flagged in the claim.
• Undated evergreen pages carry their retrieval date (or verified archive-snapshot date) as "published no later than."

Corrections

History is protected mechanically: continuous integration rejects any commit that deletes or rewrites an existing claim or event, unless the commit carries an explicit correction entry recording what changed, why, and what replaced it. The correction log ships with the site's source data.

Limits

• The Atlas currently covers one chain — rare earths through NdFeB magnets. Gallium/germanium, graphite, antimony, and lithium chains are planned, not present.
• Deposit-level coverage (USGS MRDS, USMIN, and Earth MRI resource layers — deposits below the mine stage) is planned but not yet ingested; today's facility coverage starts at mines and feedstock projects.
• Capacity figures are recorded only where a source publishes a number and its basis (nameplate, demonstrated, or target). Absence of a capacity figure means no source states one.
• Private-company statuses often rest on company disclosures; those carry "confirmed" for the company's own actions but are not audits.
• Engineering property data (the MatWeb domain) is out of scope by design.
• A small number of sources still lack archive snapshots; each carries a dated note, and archive backfill runs as an ongoing pass.