Public methodology

What the platform is and is not, how data is governed, and how recommendations stay source-cited.

This page explains what to trust, what to verify, and how to fix source-cited data without turning the main product flows into an operations manual.

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What it is

An unofficial beta preview of a source-cited public intelligence layer for Texas innovation resources. It organizes allowed public sources into city pages, entity profiles, recommendations, data-quality signals, and governed correction paths.

What it is not

Not an official state, city, Texas Venture Alliance, or Founders Arena product; not a complete Texas inventory; not a ranking system; and not legal, medical, financial, grant, investment, or eligibility advice.

Privacy boundary

Public data boundary

The public data boundary keeps source-cited product fields visible while protected operator, owner, submitter, source-capture, and service fields are intentionally not exposed.

Public pages and responses show

Stable public links, entity types, source references, confidence, freshness, and updated timestamps for published source-cited records.

Protected work requires operator access

Evidence decisions, source operations, merges, claim evidence, audit state, and private review metadata stay in the operator workspace.

Owner and submitter data stays scoped

Founder profile persistence, claim identity, correction submitter identity, and recommendation profile links are not exposed through anonymous public browsing.

Fields intentionally not exposed

Public responses exclude these details even when related records exist in protected review and source-capture work.

  • operator notes
  • source capture contents
  • submitter contact details
  • claim evidence files
  • reviewer notes
  • sensitive moderation metadata
  • audit change details
  • server credentials

Contract fields tracked: 10

Governance

Source tiers

Source tiers make evidence quality visible without implying official endorsement.

official

Government, university, program, event, or organization pages controlled by the source owner.

primary

Direct public pages from the named organization, event host, fund, accelerator, lab, or program operator.

secondary

Public news, ecosystem publications, partner pages, or announcement pages that cite a source but are not the owner page.

community

User-submitted public candidates that still require evidence review before they affect public records.

unknown

Sources with incomplete trust metadata. These should be reviewed before they support recommendations or presentation claims.

Source categories

Source categories

These are the public source categories the current source registry and source submission workflow understand.

Official source page

Pages controlled by the source owner for an ecosystem resource, program, organization, or event.

City or economic development page

City, chamber, innovation district, or economic development pages that describe local ecosystem resources.

University resource page

Technology transfer, entrepreneurship center, commercialization, lab, or student venture pages.

Accelerator or program page

Accelerator, incubator, venture studio, cohort, application, or mentor program pages.

Event calendar

Allowed public event calendars, event host pages, or registration pages.

Public announcement or news source

Public source evidence used to support source-cited records.

Grant or challenge page

Grant, challenge, open call, competition, or public funding opportunity pages.

Investor resource page

Investor organization, angel network, public fund, or portfolio pages.

Space or facility page

Coworking, wet lab, maker space, innovation district, or facility pages.

Partner directory

Public partner, sponsor, member, or ecosystem directory pages with reviewable listings.

Community source suggestion

Public source candidates submitted by users and held for evidence review.

Pipeline

Extraction, dedupe, freshness, and recommendation logic

The graph favors reviewable source evidence over unsupported claims.

How sources are selected

Sources must be public, relevant to Texas innovation, allowed by crawl policy or marked manual-only, and useful for organizations, programs, events, opportunities, investors, spaces, university resources, city coverage, or source-quality review.

Extraction

Deterministic parsers and structured extraction produce candidate entities and assertions. Material facts need a source URL, extraction method, confidence score, and extracted-at timestamp before they can support public profiles.

Deduplication

Candidates are compared by canonical URL, domain, normalized name, city, address, parent organization, source overlap, and review signals. Ambiguous matches stay in review instead of silently merging.

Confidence

Confidence is a review signal, not a public ranking. High-confidence records can still be corrected, medium-confidence records should carry caveats, and low or missing confidence records need verification before routing.

Freshness

Each source has a refresh policy. Records can be fresh, due soon, stale, or unknown; stale records are visible as data-quality signals and should not drive recommendation or outreach claims without verification.

Stale records

Stale events, deadlines, closed programs, and unsupported claims are flagged, deprioritized, hidden from default routing, or held for correction/review when their source evidence is no longer current.

Recommendation logic

Recommendations are generated from deterministic fit signals: city/region, sector, stage, needs, audience, status, source freshness, confidence, eligibility caveats, and public action URLs. The platform explains why a result matched and cites the underlying source references.

Corrections and claims

Corrections, claims, and removals

Human correction and owner review are part of the product, not a support afterthought.

Corrections

Anyone can report inaccurate, stale, duplicate, missing, or removal-requested data. Corrections enter evidence review and do not update public records automatically.

Open path

Claims

Organization or program owners can request a claim with signed-in identity and public verification evidence. A claim does not grant permissions until reviewed.

Open path

Suggested sources

Users can submit public source candidates for missing city categories, stale records, or stronger evidence. Submission does not make a city complete.

Open path

Public sample

Sample active sources

This public sample is loaded from reviewed public records so the methodology page reflects the same public sources used by public pages.

8

Source records

5

Trust tiers

11

Source categories