CASEMAP: Who, What, When, and What Proves It
A case is not a story. It is a set of facts, each of which is either proved by something or is not, and a set of issues, each of which some of those facts bear on. Prose hides both, because an unevidenced assertion reads exactly like an evidenced one. Here an event points at the documents behind it, a document that proves nothing is visible, and a stretch of time with nothing in it at all is visible too.
The matter
1. People and organisations
Everyone who appears in an event. An alias is any other name the papers use for the same person.
2. Documents
What proves things. The confidence is about where the document came from, not about whether you believe what it says.
3. Issues in dispute
The things that actually have to be decided. Tag events to them and the schedule for each issue builds itself.
4. Events
A date you are sure of and a date you are guessing at are different things, so say which. The chronology prints only what the precision allows.
5. Chronology
6. Who appears with whom
7. Gaps
What is asserted with nothing behind it, what is held with nothing it proves, and where the calendar goes quiet.
8. By issue
9. Import events
A CSV, or a chronology already written as a list of date and description lines. Nothing is added until you have seen what the dates were understood as.
10. Take it away
What this is, and what it is not
A date has a precision, and the page respects it. March 2026 is not 1 March 2026, and a tool that turns one into the other has invented a fact. An event can be exact, approximate, a month, a year, or between two dates. It prints as what it is, sorts from the earliest day it could have happened, and is measured for gaps from the latest day it could have happened.
A gap is measured so that it cannot be an artefact of imprecision. A quiet period runs from the last day the earlier event could have happened to the first day the later one could have. Two events dated only to the same year therefore report no gap at all between them, which is correct: nothing is known about the order, so nothing can be said about the space between.
An event with nothing behind it is marked, not hidden. Every event without a document is flagged in the chronology and listed in the gap report. So is every document no event refers to, which is usually either a fact nobody has written down yet or a document that does not belong in the bundle.
The issues are how a case theory gets built. Name the things actually in dispute, tag events to them, and each issue gets its own schedule of the events and the evidence. Reading a matter issue by issue rather than date by date is what shows you which issue you cannot presently prove.
The import shows you what it understood before it commits. Dates are read tolerantly: 14 March 2026, 14/03/2026, March 2026, 2026, about 4 April, between 1 and 14 April 2026. A slash date is read day first and the preview says so, because the same six characters mean two different days on two sides of an ocean. Nothing is added to the matter until you have seen the table and pressed the button.
Everything stays in this tab. The matter lives in this browser's local storage and nothing is uploaded. Clearing site data clears it, so save the matter to a file. That file holds the whole map and opens again here.
It is a way of organising facts, not a way of deciding them. It does not know whether a document proves what you say it proves, whether a witness is right, or what any of it means in law. It puts the facts where you can see them and shows you which ones have nothing behind them.
Questions people ask
Why does an event need a precision at all?
Because most facts in a real matter are not known to the day, and a chronology that prints a day for all of them is lying by presentation. A witness who says it was some time in March should appear in the chronology as March, so that nobody later argues about a date the witness never gave.
How does an event between two dates sort?
From the earlier of the two, because that is the earliest it can have happened. An event known only to a year sorts from the first of January of that year for the same reason, and a month from the first of the month. None of those invented days is ever printed.
What counts as a quiet period?
A stretch longer than the number of days you set, running from the last day the previous event could have happened to the first day the next one could have. The default is thirty days. On a matter where things happen weekly, set it lower; on one that ran for years, set it higher.
What date formats does the import read?
ISO dates, day-month-year in words or in figures, month-year, a bare year, an approximate date written with about, circa, on or about, early, mid or late, and a range written as between two dates or as 1-14 March 2026. A date it cannot read is shown in the preview as one it could not place, and that row is left out rather than guessed at.
Can I import from a chronology I already have?
If it is a list of lines each beginning with a date, yes. Paste it in and read it as date and description lines; it splits at the first dash, en dash, em dash or colon. A chronology written as prose paragraphs will need cutting into lines first.
Do the documents themselves get uploaded?
No, and they are never held here. What is recorded is a description, a date, where it came from, its bundle reference and how confident you are of its provenance. The documents stay wherever you keep them.