Methodology

1. What a profile is and who compiles it

A profile is a public page about one local business. It presents facts such as the business name, address, phone number, website, opening hours, category and description, and it answers questions through an AI assistant that works from the information on that page.

Profiles are compiled by Axondigi Ltd, a registered company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Questions about this method, or about a specific profile, can be sent to [email protected].

2. Sources and how we weigh them

Each fact on a profile comes from one of five kinds of source. The kind is stored with the fact, next to the date the fact was last checked.

Owner published

The business's own website and social pages.

Official record

Government registries. They are used for the legal name and the registration status of a business only.

Open data

Open places data such as Overture Maps and Foursquare OS Places. It is used for the address and contact details of a business when the business has not published them itself, and it is being added city by city, starting with Halifax.

Owner managed

Information the business enters itself after claiming its profile on Axondigi.

Staff visit

Details that Axondigi staff checked in person at the business.

When sources disagree, the source closest to the business is preferred. What a business manages on Axondigi is preferred over what staff saw on a visit, and both are preferred over open data. The legal name always comes from the official record and cannot be edited by the business.

3. How facts are checked

Sources are compared against each other before a fact is shown. When two sources disagree about the same fact, the rules in section 2 decide which one is used.

Every fact carries the date it was last checked. Sources are re-checked on a schedule and whenever a report comes in; monthly refreshes of open places data are being introduced with the Halifax rollout.

A last-checked date is not a guarantee that nothing has changed since. Hours, phone numbers and other details can change at any time, and reporting a mistake (see section 5) is the fastest way to have it corrected.

4. What AI does and does not do

AI is used to read the cited sources, to extract facts from them, and to draft short summaries that point back to those sources.

AI does not invent phone numbers, addresses or legal names. Those facts come only from the sources described above.

When an automated extraction produced a fact, the fact says so and points to its source, so it can always be told apart from information that came from the business or from an official record.

5. How to correct a profile

A profile can be corrected in three ways.

• The business can claim its profile and manage it directly. Find your business to start.
• Anyone can use the Report incorrect information link at the bottom of a profile. Each report is reviewed before anything on the profile changes.
• AI assistants connected through the MCP endpoint can report incorrect information as well, and those reports go through the same review.

6. Licences and attribution

Some facts on a profile, mainly addresses and contact details, come from open datasets published by others. We are grateful to the organizations that make them available, and each dataset is used under its own licence.

• Overture Maps Foundation places data, licensed under the Community Data License Agreement - Permissive, Version 2.0 (CDLA-Permissive-2.0). Source: overturemaps.org.
• Foursquare OS Places, licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Source: opensource.foursquare.com/os-places.
• Government of Canada data, used under the Open Government Licence - Canada. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Canada.