OPDA Knowledge base
Concept tier claim

Document Evidence

opda:DocumentEvidence

Document Evidence

A Document Evidence is a paper or scanned artefact issued by an authoritative source — for example, a grant of probate issued by HM Courts and Tribunals Service.

Why it matters

Document Evidence is the workhorse of conveyancing: probate grants, lasting powers of attorney, statutory declarations, court orders. Court-issued documents earn an eIDAS Substantial assurance tier when properly verified. OPDA models Document Evidence as a distinct Evidence subtype so its issuance chain, document-id, and original-vs-copy status are first-class — not flattened into a generic “evidence blob”.

If you are a conveyancer or compliance officer working with paper evidence (or scans of paper), this is the entity that captures the issuance trail.

Hard cases

  • Scanned copy vs original. A scan of a paper Document is still Document Evidence — the IC discriminates by issuance authority, not by physical vs digital form.
  • Document revoked post-issuance. Probate is granted then revoked. The Document Evidence record persists with a revocation annotation; any Verification Activity that relied on it inherits the status change.
  • Document with no authoritative source. A self-prepared declaration with no court or registrar issuance. The IC says: this is not Document Evidence — it is at best Vouch Evidence (attestation by the declaring party).

Identity Criterion

A Document Evidence record is identified by its (issuing authority, document-id) pair — for example, (HMCTS, probate-grant-reference). Two records refer to the same Document only if both components match. See the Logical tier → for the typed structure.

  • Evidence — Document Evidence is one of three Evidence subtypes
  • Document — short-name alias used by worked examples (same OWL identity)
  • Claim — Claims supported by Document Evidence
  • Verification Activity — verifies a Claim using Document Evidence
%%{init: {"theme": "base"}}%% flowchart LR accTitle: Document Evidence related-Kinds neighbourhood graph accDescr: Document Evidence as one of three Evidence subtypes, with short-name alias Document; identified by (issuing authority, document-id); supports Claims and is used by Verification Activities; court-issued Documents earn eIDAS Substantial. classDef centre fill:#E1BEE7,stroke:#6A1B9A,stroke-width:3px,color:#4A148C classDef cls fill:#B3E5FC,stroke:#0277BD,stroke-width:2px,color:#01579B classDef alias fill:#FFF9C4,stroke:#F57F17,stroke-width:2px,color:#E65100 DocEv["DocumentEvidence"]:::centre Evidence["Evidence
(supertype)"]:::cls Doc["Document
(alias)"]:::alias Claim["Claim"]:::cls Verification["VerificationActivity"]:::cls DocEv -.->|"isA"| Evidence DocEv ===|"owl:equivalentClass"| Doc Claim -->|"supportedBy"| DocEv Verification -->|"uses"| DocEv

Source ODR

ODR-0009 — Claims, evidence, provenance §Q1

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