Edge Node
A machine positioned close to where events surface, holding connections open so an event is received rather than fetched later.
An edge node is a machine deployed near the activity it observes rather than in a central region. Its defining behavior is that it listens: it holds its connections to regional sources open and receives events as they occur, instead of asking on a schedule and discovering them, on average, half an interval late. That difference is structural, and it is why polling systems quote latency in minutes while an event-driven architecture quotes it in seconds.
The node is also the unit of accountability. It stamps the event time against the network's reference clock, attaches its own identity to the record, and is the first link in that record's provenance chain. Coverage in a region is deliberately redundant across nodes, so a node or a source going quiet degrades a region rather than opening a hole in the data - and the records that do arrive say which path they took.
Real-time data, at edge speed.
A live evaluation measures EdgeOrigin against your coverage requirements: decision-ready real-time data, delivery latency into your systems, and record-level provenance.