Methodology

The sourcing dataset separates upstream facts from Salient One derivations. Each row can identify the source directory URL, a record-level URL, source effective date, retrieval time, derivation owner, method version, assessment basis and enforcement status. Retrieval time is operational freshness; it is never treated as the date the source fact became effective.

World Bank forest-area trend. S1 reads indicator AG.LND.FRST.ZS, compares the oldest and newest available values in the retrieval window and calculates the relative annual change against the oldest forest-area percentage. Positive loss of at least 0.2%, 0.7% and 1.5% per year routes to moderate, high and severe review bands. This is an S1 calculation from World Bank forest-area data, not a Global Forest Watch tree-cover-loss measure.

EUDR evidence-review scope. Existing country × covered-commodity combinations are published as S1 screening flags with no public severity band. They help route evidence collection; they are not the European Union country benchmark. The official country classification remains a distinct legal source and must be checked at decision time.

Conflict-area mineral screening. The current country × mineral assessment is a fixed S1 review-priority snapshot based on a 2021–2024 evidence review. Its published bands are S1 screening bands, not OECD designations. The European Commission describes the official CAHRA list as indicative, non-exhaustive and periodically updated, so current primary material remains mandatory.

CBP enforcement actions. Only actions whose current source status is Active or partially modified/active contribute to current evidence. Inactive actions are excluded. A WRO routes to moderate because CBP describes its evidence as reasonable but inconclusive; a Finding routes to high because it is a determination. The source status and effective date remain visible.

Product safety and labour. Source observations are mapped to the common S1 sector taxonomy. The labour-goods adapter accepts only an official publication with a verified stated effective date, at least 80 resolved countries and at least 150 unique goods. Goods without a high-confidence sector rule remain in the source table but are not assigned to a sector. Any qualitative routing band calculated by S1 is identified through derived_by and method_version. Absence of a subject match is a coverage statement, not evidence of low risk.

Download the machine-readable method (JSON)

Each country is evaluated across seven risk groups containing the available country indicators. Every indicator is assigned a risk level — low, moderate, high, or severe — based on fixed, transparent thresholds derived from the source's own scale or established risk-assessment practice.

Within each group, the most elevated available indicator determines the group band. The composite then averages the seven group scores, excluding groups without data from the denominator. This prevents a cluster of correlated indicators from receiving disproportionate weight.

The composite score is reproducible from the group results. Low, moderate, high and severe groups score 0, 1, 2 and 3. S1 sums the available group scores, divides by the number of groups with data, computes a base score as (average ÷ 3) × 100, then publishes min(100, round(base score × (100 ÷ 65))). The calibration preserves the engine's established 0–100 display scale; the qualitative band is determined from the uncalibrated average: low at ≤0.4, moderate at ≤0.9, high at ≤1.6 and severe above 1.6. A severe group prevents the overall result from being classified as low, but it does not automatically make the entire country severe.

A minimum of two indicator groups with data is required to compute a composite rating. Where data is missing for a specific indicator, that group is excluded from the denominator rather than treated as evidence of low risk.

The EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD, Directive 2024/1760) requires large companies to assess human rights and environmental risks across their own operations, subsidiaries, and value chains. S/1 is designed as a country-level intelligence and monitoring tool for procurement risk analysis — providing rapid intelligence on which jurisdictions carry elevated risk of adverse impacts.

Below is the mapping of S/1's fifteen indicator groups to specific CSDDD obligations. Each indicator serves one or more articles; the coverage level indicates whether S/1 provides full country-level signals, partial signals requiring entity-level follow-up, or no coverage (gap).

The signal engine compares a user-supplied name against tens of thousands of public-list records across 18 configured restriction and debarment sources: OFAC SDN, EU Consolidated, UK FCDO, UN Security Council, Swiss SECO, DFAT Australia, Global Affairs Canada, World Bank Debarment, EBRD Ineligible, EIB Exclusion, SAM.gov Exclusions, US State Department, Treasury non-SDN, US BIS Export Controls (Entity List + Denied Persons + Unverified), UFLPA Entity List, ADB Debarment, IDB Group Debarment, and AfDB Debarment. It also matches against listed aliases and known spelling variants to catch alternative renderings of sanctioned names.

Matching uses a weighted ensemble of four complementary techniques, each contributing to a combined confidence score (0–1):

• Jaccard token overlap — measures how many words (tokens) the query and the target name share, normalised by the total number of unique tokens. Robust to word reordering and partial name matches.
• Dice coefficient on character bigrams — compares overlapping two-character sequences between the query and target. Effective at catching typographical errors and minor spelling variations.
• Levenshtein edit distance — counts the minimum number of single-character insertions, deletions, or substitutions needed to transform one string into the other. Normalised by string length to produce a 0–1 score.
• Double Metaphone phonetic hashing — encodes names into pronunciation-based keys, so names that sound similar (e.g. Muhammad / Mohamed) hash to the same or nearby values regardless of spelling differences.

The four scores are combined into a weighted ensemble, with higher weight given to token-level matching for multi-word names and phonetic matching for single-word names. A configurable minimum confidence threshold (default 35%) filters results before they are returned.

Transliteration support covers Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian), Arabic, and Chinese (Simplified) scripts. Names in these scripts are automatically Romanised before comparison, enabling cross-script matching without requiring the user to know the original script.

When optional fields are provided — date of birth, passport or ID number, IMO number, address, or place of birth — the engine applies exact and near-exact matching on those fields as a secondary signal. A field-level match boosts the overall confidence score but is not required for a result to be returned.