> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.vangrid.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # How Vangrid Works: The Spatial Data Pipeline > Learn how Vangrid's decentralized edge network collects, processes, and delivers verified spatial data to your applications in real time. Vangrid is a decentralized data rail — a continuously operating network of edge nodes that captures real-world spatial observations, processes them locally, and delivers cryptographically verified results to your application through a single REST API. Understanding how data moves through this pipeline helps you write better queries, interpret responses correctly, and design systems that rely on ground truth rather than approximations. ## Key terminology Before walking through the pipeline, it helps to understand the core terms you'll encounter throughout these docs. Ground truth refers to verified, real-world spatial observations captured directly by physical sensors. In Vangrid's context, ground truth data is corroborated by multiple independent edge nodes and accompanied by a cryptographic provenance hash that proves its origin and integrity. Ground truth is distinct from inferred or synthetic data — it reflects what actually existed in the physical world at a specific place and time. An edge node is a physical sensing device in the Vangrid network. Nodes capture continuous multi-view spatial data from their local environment and perform all processing on-device before any data leaves the node. You never purchase or manage edge nodes — you query the network and Vangrid routes your request to the appropriate nodes. A provenance hash is a cryptographic signature attached to every Vangrid data response. It encodes the identity of the originating node, the capture timestamp, and a hash of the raw observation, giving you tamper-evident proof that the data hasn't been altered between capture and delivery. You can use the hash to audit, archive, or independently verify any response. A spatial query is an API request that specifies a geographic area of interest (AOI), a time range, and optional filters. Vangrid routes the query to edge nodes that cover the AOI, aggregates their responses, and returns a ranked, provenance-stamped payload. Queries can return real-time observations or historical records. The data rail is Vangrid's end-to-end pipeline — from edge capture through edge-compute, cryptographic signing, aggregation, and API delivery. Calling it a "rail" emphasizes that data moves along a defined, governed path with sovereignty controls at each stage, rather than being routed through arbitrary third-party infrastructure. ## How data flows through Vangrid The pipeline moves data from the physical world to your application in five stages. Edge nodes in the Vangrid network continuously capture spatial observations from their environment using heterogeneous sensors — cameras, depth sensors, lidar, and more. Each node operates independently, and nodes in the same area observe the same scene from different angles and modalities, producing multi-view coverage. Raw sensor streams are processed entirely on the node before any data is transmitted. The node extracts spatial features, runs local inference, and discards raw pixel or point-cloud data. This means personally identifiable information and sensitive scene details never leave the device — privacy is enforced at the hardware boundary, not in software after the fact. After local processing, each node signs its observation with a private key. The resulting provenance hash encodes the node identity, capture timestamp, and observation content. Any downstream modification to the data would invalidate the signature, giving you a verifiable chain of custody from sensor to API response. Signed observations from multiple nodes covering the same AOI are aggregated by Vangrid's infrastructure. Observations are cross-corroborated to produce a `ground_truth_score` — a confidence metric that increases as more independent nodes agree on the same spatial state. Conflicting observations are flagged rather than silently discarded. The aggregated, scored, and signed payload is returned through the Enterprise Spatial API as structured JSON. Each feature in the response includes geometry, timestamps, `ground_truth_score`, and `provenance_hash`. You can use the response directly, stream it to downstream systems, or archive it with the provenance hash for future audits. Vangrid routes every query through nodes within your designated data sovereignty boundary. Data does not transit infrastructure outside that boundary unless you explicitly configure cross-region access. ## What makes this different from cloud-first alternatives Most spatial data platforms aggregate sensor data in a central cloud before returning results. This introduces three problems: raw data transits third-party networks, there is no per-observation provenance, and latency grows with the distance between sensors and cloud regions. Vangrid inverts this model. Processing happens at the edge, provenance is attached at the source, and the API layer is a thin delivery surface over a distributed network. You get lower latency, stronger privacy guarantees, and cryptographic proof for every observation — without deploying any infrastructure. If you are building a system that needs to demonstrate data integrity to regulators, auditors, or partners, store the `provenance_hash` from each response alongside your application data. You can use it to reconstruct and verify the chain of custody at any time. ## Explore the pipeline in depth How the 3B+ node network is structured, how nodes are selected for your queries, and what multi-view ingestion means in practice. A step-by-step breakdown of how data moves from capture through signing to your API response, including latency and format details. How Vangrid defines and calculates ground truth, what the `ground_truth_score` means, and when to use real-time vs. historical data.