Honesty by construction.
OpenTAC is built so the data is citable in an investigation or a paper. Confidence is a first-class field, every claim carries its source, and nothing is invented to fill a gap.
Every claim carries its source
Operator, unit, base and role each link to a primary source. Confidence is recorded as verified, reported or going-dark — never implied. You can click through to the evidence behind any identity.
Unknowns are left blank
Where OpenTAC doesn't know, it says so. A field with no sourced value stays empty rather than being guessed or interpolated — the absence is information, too.
The gap is the story
The live picture is exact; the archived trail may be sparse where the deadband dropped redundant fixes. When a contact goes dark, the gap is shown as a gap and flagged by the dark-span detector — replay interpolates only between fixes the archive actually holds, never across a fabricated position.
Predictions are labelled
Satellite positions are propagated from public orbital elements and are always marked as predictions, with the element epoch and age on screen so staleness is visible. They are never tasking, signals, or payload data.
Identity, sourced from ~26 datasets
A monthly cross-reference ingest pulls identity and inventory data from around two dozen free, openly-licensed public sources — plane-alert, CelesTrak, Wikidata, OpenSky and more — and records which source contributed what, with its URL and licence, on every row. The human-curated watchlist always wins on conflict.
Licence travels with the data.
Every contributing source carries a licence tier (public-domain, attribution, share-alike, unclear, restricted) and a redistribution layer (canonical, open, internal-only). Because a published dataset inherits its most restrictive input, OpenTAC can emit licence-clean exports at three levels, so you never accidentally republish data you don't have the right to:
- permissive — public-domain / attribution rows only; safe to republish freely with credit.
- sharealike — CC-BY-SA-safe; drops restricted-tier sources.
- internal — everything, including restricted sources; for your own analysis, never for redistribution.
opentac export --profile sharealike --out reference.csv
Assets, not individuals.
OpenTAC tracks state and public-service assets. The watchlist scope rules forbid private individuals and minors and are enforced in CI; scope-sensitive categories route to a designated reviewer. A Code of Conduct is shown on first run — the tool is built for accountability and journalism, not targeting.
Trust comes from being checkable.
The application is MIT-licensed and the watchlist is CC-BY-SA — audit every line.