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SOURCE / PORTALS

Portals. The data trapped behind a form.

Lookup tools, search pages, and dashboards hold real government data, but only one query at a time. The engine works the form, captures what comes back, and turns it into records you can hold, compare, and trace.

Sources portals

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What it is

A portal is a government database with a form bolted to the front. The data is public, but it only answers one lookup at a time, and it rarely lets you take the whole thing with you. What you can see, you usually cannot save, compare across records, or watch for change.

The challenge

Portals are built for a single person asking a single question. There is no file to download, no feed to subscribe to, and no record of what the answer was yesterday. The engine queries the portal the way a person would, captures each result as a dated record, and assembles the full picture the portal will not hand over.

What the engine pulls from portals

  • Provider, entity, and facility lookups
  • License, permit, and credential search
  • Award, grant, and contract explorers
  • Eligibility and benefit checkers
  • Agency dashboards published in place of a download
  • Each result captured as a dated, source-pinned record

In practice

A team needs every licensed facility in a state, but the portal returns one at a time. The engine works the lookup end to end, captures each record with the date it was read, and returns the full set, traceable to the portal it came from.

How the engine handles it

Every source runs the same five auditable stages, so what reaches you carries the record of where it came from and when it was checked.

  1. find
  2. store
  3. retrieve
  4. verify
  5. productize

Other sources the engine ingests

Documents Rules, guidance, and waivers: the written record. Datasets Tables, open data, and APIs: the numbers. Filings Audits, disclosures, and reports: what was done. Notices Opportunities and deadlines: the clock.

Questions

What counts as a portal source?

Any government lookup tool, search page, or dashboard that holds public data but only answers one query at a time: provider and license lookups, award explorers, eligibility checkers, and the dashboards agencies publish instead of a download. If the data is public but trapped behind a form, the engine treats it as a portal source.

How does the engine get data out of a portal?

It works the form the way a person would, one query at a time, and captures each result as a structured, dated record. What the portal will only show one answer at a time, the engine assembles into the full picture, with each record pinned to the portal and the moment it was read.

Can a portal result be traced and trusted later?

Yes. Every captured result carries the portal it came from and the date it was read, so a figure that was true on a given day stays defensible even after the portal updates behind the form.

Which products are built from portals?

Portals feed navigators, dashboards, and datasets, anywhere a complete, current picture has to be reconstructed from a tool that was only ever built to answer one lookup at a time.

From this source to a verified product.

Tell us the source and the question. You get a working product, every fact pinned.

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Every portal source the engine holds

The lookup tools, dashboards and state program sites where public data sits behind a form. These are the hardest sources to cite reliably, which is why every one is listed with the date it was read.

  • 494sources
  • 31held and sealed
  • 384on a .gov domain
  • 146distinct domains
  • 281Kcharacters held
  • 8we could not hold

Showing all 494