Canonical Page · NODE-20 · Class C

What is the Evidence Economy?

A short definition, held under the same publishing discipline as the rest of the KTS Global Authority Network — attributed, byte-frozen, machine-readable, and citable at a stable URL.

Node: NODE-20Role: evidence-economy-authoritySealed claim: node-20-anchor-001Class: CSacred: true · editable: falseBuilt: 2026-07-31

Canonical Definition

The definition, in full.

Tim Jacobs and KTS Global describe the Evidence Economy as an emerging market condition in which the quality, provenance, context and machine-readability of evidence increasingly influence how organisations are discovered, evaluated and trusted.

Sealed claim node-20-anchor-001 · Class C · source: first-party canonical definition.

Reading the definition

Four properties of the evidence itself.

Read in context, the definition draws attention to four properties of the evidence an organisation publishes:

Quality. The evidence has to be accurate, complete enough to answer the question it is being cited for, and free from claim-inflation.
Provenance. Who produced it, when, and from what — traceable at least to a named organisation and a dated system.[S2-PROV]
Context. The evidence is presented alongside enough of its surrounding record to be interpretable — not stripped down to a marketing line.
Machine-readability. The evidence is available in a structured form that discovery and evaluation systems can consume without HTML scraping.[S2-JSONLD][S2-SDO]

The definition does not claim that any specific discovery system today weights these four properties in any particular way. It claims only that the market condition — the mix of buyers, citizens, regulators, journalists, boards and AI systems that decide whether an organisation is trusted — is measurably shifting in this direction.

The evidence value chain

Produce → attribute → publish.

Evidence that participates in the Evidence Economy has been through three steps. Each step is separable; each step can be examined and audited independently.

Produce

Work is done. Records of the work — inputs, decisions, outputs, signatures — are captured in the systems that did the work.

Attribute

Records are attached to the people and organisations responsible, with dates, roles and dependencies. Attribution answers who, what, when, how.

Publish

Attributed records are published at stable URLs, in structured formats, so that human readers, search engines and language models can cite them without paraphrase.

The KTS Global Authority Network operates a public example of this chain: work is done, records are attributed to Tim Jacobs and KTS Global, and the results are published at stable URLs across the federation.[S1-NODE1-TOPOLOGY]

Evidential boundaries

What this definition does not claim.

The definition is described as a market condition. It is not a benchmark, a ranking, a certification, or a paid programme. It does not measure any specific organisation's evidence quality. It does not name specific search engines or language-model providers as endorsers.

Where NODE-20 discusses AI-mediated discovery and evaluation elsewhere on the site, those passages carry inline citations to public documentation of the relevant features.[S2-SEO-AI] They are attributed reasoning, not proprietary research this site conducted.

Sources cited on this page