Treat compatibility as governed product data, not an untraceable text field.
Represent vehicle, machine, engine, device or equipment relationships as structured compatibility with source provenance, aliases, confidence and explicit overrides.
Keep the relationship, the subject and the evidence separate.
Canonical subjects
Represent manufacturer, model, variant, generation and year ranges as normalized compatibility subjects.
Aliases
Resolve supplier-specific model names to a shared subject without discarding the supplier term that was received.
Positive fitment
Store approved product-to-subject relationships with source evidence and approval state.
Exclusions
Represent explicit non-fitment separately so exclusions are not mistaken for missing data.
Provenance
Track which supplier/source asserted the relationship and preserve its original compatibility evidence.
Overrides & review
Customer overrides can survive source disappearance while ambiguous or conflicting relationships can be held for review.
The same compatibility layer can model other equipment domains.
The platform treats fitment as a domain specialization rather than hard-coding a motorcycle schema. Subject metadata can carry domain-specific detail while provenance, review and override behavior stays consistent.