Methodology

What this site shows

This site tracks two kinds of federal primary source filings for a watchlist of entities: lobbying disclosures filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, and federal contract awards recorded by USAspending. A confluence is an entity resolved filing dated, or for a contract award last touched by USAspending, inside a rolling ninety day window, where at least two distinct kinds of filing exist for the same entity inside that window. This is the same definition, computed by the same shared database function, that the underlying system uses internally to decide whether an entity is worth a human’s attention, not a separate definition built for this site alone. Every count, total and date on this site is computed directly from the filings listed on the filings page. Nothing here is estimated, projected or modeled.

The filings page is not windowed the same way. It lists every filing on record for an entity regardless of date, since its job is to be the complete evidentiary record a confluence traces back to, not a second view of the same ninety day window.

What entity resolution does, and does not, claim

A filing names a client, registrant or contract recipient as a plain text string, exactly as the source agency recorded it. That string is matched to a watchlist entity by whole word comparison against a hand kept alias list, never by a fuzzy or approximate match. A match means the filing’s own text contains the entity’s name or a known alias of it as a complete word, nothing more.

A filing that cannot be matched this way is never dropped. It appears on the filings page marked unmatched, carrying the exact string the source agency recorded, and is queued for a human to review and decide whether it names an entity already on the watchlist under a spelling the alias list does not yet cover. An unmatched filing is not evidence of anything about an entity; it is a filing this site has not yet been able to place.

A match is a claim about text, not about ownership or corporate structure. This site does not resolve subsidiaries, mergers or parent companies beyond what a human has explicitly entered into the alias list.

Update cadence

The underlying store is fed by a daily automated poll of both source agencies’ public APIs, one narrow query per watchlist entity. This site itself refreshes on the same daily schedule, after that day’s poll completes successfully. A number on this site can lag the underlying agency source by up to one day for that reason, never longer under normal operation.

The archive.org column on the filings page moves on its own, separate schedule, roughly every thirty minutes, independent of the once daily refresh described above. A filing can show pending there for longer than that even after its capture has actually succeeded, simply because this site has not rebuilt since. Pending is not a stalled or failed capture, it is this site’s own refresh lagging a background process that runs more often than the page does, and it will read as captured, or as failed after five attempts, the next time this site rebuilds.

The correction path

Every filing on the filings page links to its original source document. If a figure here looks wrong, the source link is the place to check first, since this site never edits or reinterprets what a source filing says. An entity match that looks wrong is a question for the alias list behind entity resolution, described above, not a data error on any individual filing.

Legacy backfilled filings, and why some dates are missing

This store began with a one time backfill of filings already on file locally from before this site existed, marked backfilled on the filings page. That backfill carried over every filing exactly as it was originally captured, but it could not recover data the original capture never requested. Contract filings from the backfill carry no occurred date or published date for that reason: the original capture did not request the two USAspending fields those dates come from. Every filing captured since, marked live ingest on the filings page, carries both dates.

Lobbying filings are not affected by this gap. Every lobbying filing, backfilled or live, carries the date it was posted, since that date was always part of the original capture.

What content hash means, and its one real limit

Every filing stores a content hash, computed once, at the moment the filing was first captured from the source agency’s own response. It is a fingerprint of that exact response, and it is what lets a repeated daily poll recognize a filing it has already seen without storing it twice.

That hash cannot be recomputed later from the stored filing to check it. The database reformats the stored copy of a filing on write, in a way that does not exactly match the format the hash was originally computed against, so a later recomputation will not match even for a filing that is completely unchanged. A mismatch on recomputation means the check was performed incorrectly, not that the filing was altered.

What an archived copy means, and the two ways one gets made

The archived copy link next to a filing is a snapshot from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and it can arrive one of two ways, marked so the difference is never hidden behind one plain link. A filing marked found had already been captured by someone else, at a time this system did not choose and was not present for; this system located it afterward. A filing marked captured was archived by this system itself, at or shortly after the moment the filing was recorded here. The date shown next to either label is when the archive was actually made, not when this system found or made it, which can lag behind by hours.

A found snapshot is weaker evidence than a captured one, and this site does not treat the two as interchangeable proof of the same thing. What a found snapshot does establish is that a page matching this filing’s source URL existed and read a certain way at some point the Wayback Machine recorded, useful on its own, just not the same claim as this system having witnessed the page at the time it recorded the filing.

Archival is ongoing, not complete. A filing with no found or captured label yet has not failed anything, it is simply still in the queue, checked on a recurring schedule until a snapshot exists or is made. A pending row is not a claim this site cannot support, it is a claim not yet finished being checked, and it will read as found or captured once that check succeeds.

What is not on this site

This site does not compute or display a salience ratio, meaning a measure of filing activity against press attention. The underlying store has a column reserved for that figure, and it is left empty on every filing by design. No source this project has confirmed as free and stable currently supplies a press mention count to serve as its denominator, and this site will not substitute an invented, scraped or estimated one in its place. A ratio with a fabricated denominator would be less honest than no ratio at all, so none is shown.