We explain our certainty
Most reference sites are black boxes — they assert, and you trust or you don’t. The Civic Graph is the opposite. Public entity records carry a confidence score and the factors behind it. Relationship scores are calculated from endpoint quality and edge-level evidence, so readers can distinguish a documented claim from a structural signal.
The publication-ready corpus
3,661 working records are excluded from this public distribution. A source URL alone does not make a record publishable: it must also meet review, confidence, locality, copy, freshness, and rights checks.
The five factors
Each citation is classed into a tier — primary/institutional (archives, the NPS, the MBTA, a university), first-party editorial, open reference (Wikidata, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap), or aggregated reviews. The best source sets the ceiling.
More sources raise confidence — and sources from different tiers raise it more, because independent confirmation matters more than repetition.
Machine-ingested records begin outside the public corpus. A review only counts when its state and date are recorded; reviewer attribution is reported separately.
Does the record cite a primary or institutional source? Governments and universities trust records that trace to authorities they recognize.
A canonical record should be whole — coordinates, a substantive description, an image, an address where applicable, a date where applicable. Completeness is part of trust.
Confidence appears on every publication-ready entity page under “How we know,” and in the canonical API on every record. See it in context on Harvard Square →