Methodology
Five steps, each one auditable.
The whole product rests on one commitment: nothing is narrated that wasn't returned by a source. Everything below exists to make that commitment mechanical rather than a promise.
- 01
Geography that doesn't dead-end
Name a city, town, ZIP, county, metro, or state and it resolves to state FIPS, every county the place touches, place code, ZCTA, tract, block group, and CBSA before any dataset is queried. Resolution falls back across the Census Geocoder, TIGERweb, the FCC Area API, and place-name matching, and results are cached. Each adapter declares the grain it speaks; the fetch layer translates your place into that grain — rolling ZIPs up to a county, fanning a metro out to member counties. Where a query had to be widened, the panel says so.
- 02
Source selection with a paper trail
Every catalog entry is scored for relevance against your stated goal, with a one-line justification. A fetch budget caps what actually executes, with per-publisher concurrency limits. Sources that were ranked but not pulled stay visible as 'considered, not pulled' with the reason — and one click pulls them anyway. Declined sources carry a reason just as selected ones do.
- 03
The Explain panel
Every source segment scores 0–100, and the score opens rather than asserts. It shows what was used — rows, geography, vintage, live versus retained, the exact query — and exactly why points were deducted.
- Widened geography
- Coarser grain than the decision unit
- Older vintage
- Suppressed values
- Restated units
- Stale capture
- Thin row count
- Upstream failure
- 04
The accuracy guardrail
The narration step receives the fetched rows and nothing else — no access to the original question's assumptions, no tool access — so there is no channel through which an invented figure could enter. No coverage is stated as a gap, by name: 'CMS Part D has no rows for Ada County at this grain.' Suppressed small-cell values are excluded from totals, never zeroed. Every number carries source, geography level, and as-of date.
- 05
One metric layer, reconciled
HCRIS, MA penetration, physician utilization, and Medicaid SDUD are restated into the same canonical KPIs — spend, service volume, capacity, population — with ratios recomputed from summed numerators and denominators rather than averaged. Units are switchable (dollars, thousands, millions; percent, per 1,000, per 100,000) and each metric is badged 'recomputed on switch' or 'rescaled only.' Where two sources can be compared but not added, the dashboard says so instead of summing them.
Every run has a summary page tracing each step, timing, and row count.
Run one