Most questions about GearDock's behavior resolve to one of these eight concepts. Reading this page once makes the rest of the documentation considerably shorter.
- Product record
- The structured facts about a product, such as manufacturer, model, attributes, and specifications, stored as separate fields rather than as prose.
- Source document
- A manufacturer or supplier file in your evidence library that can support factual statements. Documents belong to your organization and are not shared between organizations.
- Evidence
- A specific passage in a specific document, linked to the statement it supports. Evidence is what makes a claim checkable later.
- Match
- The resolution of an imported row to a specific product. Every later stage inherits this decision, so ambiguous matches are confirmed by a person.
- Gap
- An attribute that is missing, conflicting, or too weakly supported to publish. Gaps stay visible; they are not filled with plausible values.
- Draft
- Generated content that has not been reviewed. A draft is a proposal, and it carries no authority whatsoever.
- Approval
- A recorded human decision that a specific version of content is acceptable. Approval is a judgment about content, not permission to publish.
- Release
- The separate decision that approved content may leave the system. Export requires release, and release state is re-checked when an export runs.
The One Rule Worth Memorizing
Generation Is Not Approval, and Approval Is Not Release
These are three separate states with three separate decisions. Content can be generated and never approved; it can be approved and never released. There is no configuration that collapses them, because the separation is what makes each decision meaningful.
Organization Scope
Every product, document, draft, decision, and audit entry belongs to exactly one organization. Data is not shared between organizations, and content cannot reference another organization's evidence.