Seven statuses
- Status: Legally decided
- Set out in a published legal instrument, such as a Council of Ministers resolution.
- Status: Officially proposed
- Put forward by the concessionaire or the Government, but not approved.
- Status: Target / forecast
- A future date, volume or cost someone has projected. Not a guarantee.
- Status: Under review
- Being assessed by an authority, or questioned in an official response.
- Status: Historical / superseded
- Once current, now replaced. Kept for the record.
- Status: Unverified
- Reported, but not yet confirmed by a primary source.
- Status: Completed and verified
- Done, and confirmed by primary evidence.
How a claim is recorded
Each claim stores the exact statement (paraphrased or briefly quoted), who made it and when, any target date, whether it is binding, its unit, price base and scope where relevant, and links to primary sources. Separate dates record when a fact was true (as of), when we first saw it, when we last verified it and when it was superseded.
Changes and history
When a published figure or claim changes, the earlier version is kept as an immutable snapshot with the editor’s change note. Snapshots and the editorial audit log are hash-chained so that alterations can be detected. Upgrading a claim from proposed to decided requires a written note citing the decision.
Numbers
We always show the price base. A €8.9 billion estimate at 2024 prices cannot be compared with a later nominal-euro budget without recalculation, and we will say so whenever figures are not comparable.
Monitoring
An automatic source watch checks official sources and Portuguese news outlets every few hours, through their public feeds and only where their robots.txt allows. Relevant headlines appear on the news wire, linked to the original. It does not guarantee that we have seen everything.
Artificial intelligence
The publisher has chosen to let an AI system (Claude, by Anthropic) keep the site up to date between editorial reviews. When a relevant article or official document appears, it writes a short dated update in English and Portuguese and may change a record, for example a milestone’s status or date. These updates are published without prior review by an editor.
- Every automated update and every automatically changed record is labelled “Automated” and links to its source.
- A change is applied only if the AI quotes the sentence that supports it and the quote is found word for word in the source.
- A news report can never mark anything as legally decided or completed: that needs an official source, and a legal decision needs the Diário da República.
- Figures (costs, capacities) change only from official sources. Automatic updates are capped per day.
- Every change is kept in the record’s version history and can be undone. Editors review automated items and correct them; tell us if you find an error.
Disputes
Where sources disagree, we show source A and source B rather than inventing certainty.