Lineage

Lineage reconstructs the history of physical networks - gas and oil pipelines, electric transmission, water mains, roads - as temporal GIS data recovered from the archival record. Every fact about a line carries a citation to the source that says so.

The name is a pun (line + age) that also happens to be the GIS term for a dataset's provenance, which is the whole idea.

Overview site: https://lineage.tightlinesoftware.com

It grew out of Legend, a spike run with a university research group. Their interest is a timeline of US energy distribution as an input to research and policy. Tight Line's interest is the agentic extraction research.

This repository is the controlplane. It holds no code. It says which pieces exist, what goes in and out of each, who needs them first, and where each one is built. It does not say how they are built; that belongs in the component repos.

What it has to do

In order of priority:

1. Data usable in QGIS and field-standard tools, without conversion or plugins.
2. Temporal, with imprecise dates.
3. Citations, optionally with confidence.
4. Trackable evolution - who changed what, when, and on what evidence.

(4) used to mean "the git history". It now means an audit trail in the database; see decisions L-0001.

The pieces

flowchart LR
    subgraph inputs[Inputs]
        SCAN([scanned maps])
        PRESS([trade press, 1859-1961])
        SHEETS([the group's spreadsheets])
    end

    SCAN --> GEOREF[georef<br/>IIIF + Allmaps]
    GEOREF --> TRACE[trace<br/>vision candidates]
    PRESS --> CORPUS[corpus<br/>ingest + search]
    CORPUS --> CITE[cite<br/>citation generation]
    SHEETS --> BACKPORT[backport]

    TRACE --> STORE[(store<br/>network + evidence<br/>model, DB, API)]
    CITE --> STORE
    BACKPORT --> STORE

    REVIEW[review<br/>traces + citations] <--> STORE
    GEOREF --> REVIEW
    STORE --> RELEASE[release<br/>GeoPackage, GeoJSON]
    RELEASE --> QGIS([researchers in QGIS])

Loading

Repo	What it is	First needed
store	the network + evidence model, PostGIS, the audited CRUD API	Fall 2026
corpus	trade-press ingest and an authority-ranked RAG search over it	Fall 2026
cite	segments in, grounded citations out	Fall 2026, first
georef	IIIF image serving, self-hosted Allmaps, our annotation server	Fall 2026
trace	georeferenced maps in, candidate segments out	Fall 2026, research
backport	the group's existing spreadsheets into store	Fall 2026, side quest
review	authenticated review of traces and citations	Winter 2027
release	store out to versioned GeoPackage and GeoJSON	Winter 2027

Detail per component, including inputs, outputs and open questions, is in components.md. Timing is in roadmap.md.

Where things are written down

• components.md - each piece, its inputs and outputs, what it depends on
• roadmap.md - fall, winter, spring
• decisions.md - what we have decided for Lineage, and what we inherited from Legend
• open-questions.md - what is not decided, and whose call it is
• glossary.md - the words, so every repo uses them the same way