How the record is made, and what drift means

1. What we record

For every regulation we track, the official positions that decide whether a harmonised standard gives presumption of conformity: the Commission's summary lists (reference, title, start and end of legal effect, the citing and withdrawing implementing decisions and their Official Journal dates, restrictions published in the list itself), the regulation's own application dates, and the deadlines set in the standardisation request. We record what the source says, in the source's own column names, and the date we saw it. We do not infer, forecast or relabel.

2. Drift

Drift is the number of days between a dated obligation and the official record catching up with it. For a regulation it is the distance between an application date or a standardisation-request deadline and today, negative once the date has passed with the standards still uncited. For a single standard it is the distance between the deadline set for it in the standardisation request and the date its reference was first published in the Official Journal; until that publication exists, drift runs against today and is shown as open.

Drift is computed, never estimated: both ends are dates that appear in a public instrument we have archived. Where the request deadline for a standard is not public, no drift is shown for that standard. Where a draft amendment to a request has circulated but not been adopted, the adopted dates stand and the draft is noted.

Citation cadence is the companion statistic. Every row in a Commission list carries the Official Journal date on which it was published; one distinct date is one citation batch. For each regime the site reports the number of batches, the first and latest batch, the median and longest gap in days between consecutive batches, and the days elapsed since the latest one. It is descriptive: it says how often a list has moved, not why, and it counts only rows whose columns are labelled. Published on the homepage and as /data/cadence.json.

3. Capture

12 official sources are fetched every day by an automated collector. Each capture is normalised and hashed (SHA-256). If the hash differs from the previous day, the change is kept as a dated diff with the source URL; if it does not, nothing is written. A fetch that fails is recorded as an error and retried, never treated as a change. Nothing is overwritten and nothing is deleted: every version since the first capture on 8 August 2026 is in the archive.

4. What the numbers count

Standards under watch (1,682 today) counts distinct standard references across the summary lists. The lists hold more rows than references because the Commission adds one row per amended version. Two references sit under more than one regulation and are counted once. Sources captured daily counts fetched pages and documents, not the standards in them.

5. Verification and corrections

Facts that cannot be derived from the dataset (a regulation's application date, a request's deadlines) are held in a facts file with the date each was last checked against the primary source, and the site fails to build if a countdown points at a date that has passed, a record month is missing, or a placeholder is unrendered. When we get something wrong, the correction is published at /corrections/ with the date, the cause and the period the error was live. The text that carried the error is not silently edited; it gains a pointer to the correction.

6. Sources in today's capture

The hash is the first twelve characters of the SHA-256 of the normalised capture. The full hashes are in the JSON endpoint and in the archive's commit history.

7. Independence and licence

Standards Drift takes no money from the European Commission, the European standardisation organisations, trade associations or companies covered by the regimes it tracks. Everything published here is under CC BY 4.0: use it, cite it, and say where it came from. Publisher: About. Corrections: support@standardsdrift.com.