Time matters. Your systems don’t agree.
Sequence is where the value is. Assembling a true timeline is a data engineering problem long before it is a modeling problem.
Two kinds of sequence
Every organization has both. They almost never live in the same system.
Steady samples. Heart rate, vibration, price, load.
Irregular events. A visit, a repair, a trade, a plan change.
Apart, each one is just a record. Together, they explain “why.”
Event 2 changed things. Event 1 didn’t.
Do more of what worked. Stop what didn’t.
A timestamp is not a time
An entry can land in the record long after the event it describes.
The cause was found before the fix was applied. In the record, it appears after. Nothing in the schema marks the difference between when something happened and when someone entered it.
Three things to settle first
None of them are modeling questions.
Which time is this?
Nothing in a schema says whether a date is when the thing happened or when someone typed it.
Is this the same event?
Two systems overlap on most records and disagree at the edges. Whether that matters depends on the question.
What does one row mean?
Join records at different grains and you get numbers that look right and cannot be reproduced.
So we build MTN FieldMap first
What each field means, which concept it carries, and where the evidence runs out.
MTN Guide builds this FieldMap from your schemas, documentation, and API definitions, never from your records, and keeps it current as those systems change. A timeline is an artifact of this work, not something waiting in the data to be found.
What a true timeline makes possible
- Models that learn from a sequence of events rather than scoring one moment in isolation.
- Agents that can act on what happened, in the order it actually happened.
- Honest answers to what usually comes next, and where acting changes the outcome.
Build it with your own models, your own team, or a vendor you already trust.
Bring us one schema
Send a representative schema from a system you care about, and we will show you what the FieldMap finds, and what it cannot tell you without asking.