About sitmap.live

What it does

Software reads public sources every few minutes, sets aside what is not about the conflict, and groups the reports of one incident into an event. Each event goes on the map with a verification state, a place and a time, and links to every report behind it. Coverage is Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, the Red Sea and the Gulf.

What it is not

• Not an official source and not a news service. It repeats what others published and says how well each report is sourced.
• Not checked by a person. Software publishes each event, and no one reads a report first.
• Not for navigation, flight planning or any safety decision. Airspace notices, aircraft and ship positions and heat detections are context, not guidance.
• Not a tracker of people or units. Aircraft and ships appear only as their own public transponders report them.

Where the data comes from

It reads seven kinds of input. The live list of sources, with each one's tier, side and pickup rate, is on Sources.

News outlets

RSS and Atom feeds and Google News searches. A publisher found through a search that no person has rated is rated by AI and labelled so on the sources page.

Telegram channels

Public channels, read through their web previews or, for a few, Telegram's own API.

X accounts

Chosen accounts, read through X's API.

Official records

Siren alerts of the Israeli Home Front Command, relayed by the Tzeva Adom app, airspace notices (NOTAMs) from Saudi Air Navigation Services bulletins, and UKMTO maritime warnings, at present read from its X account.

Crowd reports

An anonymous crowd map of military activity in Lebanon, and reports sent to the API. The map has no form for them.

Sensors and datasets

USGS earthquakes, NASA FIRMS heat detections, GDELT (stored as leads and never shown) and Cloudflare Radar internet traffic.

Position and price feeds

Aircraft from adsb.fi, adsb.lol and OpenSky, ships from AISStream, and daily oil prices from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Credits and licences for the map's data are in the About panel of the methodology page.

How a report is checked

Rules set an event's state from the independent origins behind it and how much each weighs. A repost counts once, an outlet relaying another counts as the one it names, and sources are weighted by tier, from official down to anonymous. The four states, strongest first:

Confirmed

Independent origins agree and an official record, a neutral body or an admission against interest backs it. That is strong evidence, not certainty; it can still change.

Corroborated

Two or more independent origins report the same event. That is agreement between reports, not proof of every detail.

Single source

One origin has reported this. That is not a sign it is wrong; nobody else has reported it yet.

Unverified

No credible origin has reported this yet. That is usual for a fresh report; it does not mean the event did not happen.

An automated review can lower a state, which is how an event comes to be marked Disputed or Debunked, but it never raises one. A state says how well sourced a report is, not whether it is true. How states are set.

Corrections

States change as reports arrive. Corrections and audit log lists every event marked disputed, counts the reports debunked and taken down, and logs each change of state. A report judged false comes off the map and is not repeated there, so its claim does not spread. A person can also set an event aside by hand, remove a stored picture or stop reading a source. To dispute something, see Contact.

Where AI is used

Claude models from Anthropic are called in eight steps: deciding whether a post is about the conflict; extracting its claims (what, where, when, who); judging which reports describe one incident when the rules cannot; checking events for duplicates; judging each event, which writes its title and summary and can lower its state; rating pictures for graphic content; rating news publishers no person has rated; and writing the Today in 5 lines summary. The map labels what a model wrote.

Code alone does the rest: plain clustering, matching places against a gazetteer, the verification rules, sirens, airspace notices and the Lebanon crowd feed. Aircraft tracks, heat detections, earthquakes, oil prices and GDELT rows are never sent to a model.

Funding

Visitors pay nothing, and there are no accounts. No advertisement is shown on the site today. Some pages carry a Google AdSense tag so that Google can review the site. The site's security policy lets those pages load that script and nothing else from Google's ad servers, so no ad can appear. Privacy says which pages. Running costs are not covered by visitors or by advertising today.

Who runs it

sitmap.live is an independent project with no official standing. Write to hi@sitmap.live or find it on X as @Sitmap_live. Contact covers corrections, takedowns and press, and Privacy says what the site keeps.