Hundreds of carriers describe the same shipment moment in different words — "Processed at facility", "In Zustellung", "Entregado", "On vehicle for delivery". TrackJet maps every raw carrier status onto ONE small, canonical vocabulary, so a timeline reads the same no matter who carried the parcel. This is the status ontology.
The canonical states
There are seven canonical states. Four of them form the forward-progress sequence shown in the stepper, in this order:
1. pending — a label exists but the parcel is not moving yet (pre-transit, manifest, "information received"). 2. in_transit — the parcel is moving through the network (departed, arrived, processed at, sorting, forwarded). 3. out_for_delivery — last mile: it is on the vehicle / with the courier for delivery today. 4. delivered — terminal success: handed to the recipient or collected.
Three more states sit outside that happy path:
- exception — something needs attention: a delay, a customs hold, an address issue, a failed attempt, damage or loss.
- returned — the parcel is going back to the sender (RTO, refused, sent back).
- unknown — the carrier's wording did not match any known pattern; TrackJet says so honestly rather than guessing.
How carrier statuses are normalised
The raw status text is lower-cased and matched against keyword patterns, in a deliberate order so the most specific meaning wins:
1. returned is checked first — a return can itself be "delivered back", so it must beat the delivered rule. 2. exception next — problems take priority over movement. 3. delivered, then out_for_delivery, then pending, then the broad in_transit catch-all. 4. If nothing matches, the status is unknown.
The keyword lists are multilingual (English, German, Spanish, French), so "zugestellt", "entregado" and "livré" all normalise to delivered, and "unterwegs" / "en tránsito" to in_transit.
Why it matters
Because every carrier event is normalised the same way, the verifiable timeline, the delivery-forecast engine and the anomaly checks all reason over one consistent set of states — and the public status page shows a parcel's progress identically whether it shipped by air cargo, ocean container, post or parcel. TrackJet never invents a status: if the carrier hasn't reported one that maps cleanly, it stays unknown.