Grapevine Data Discovery
✦ How we find the sources

Building a hyper-local policy knowledge base.

Grapevine gathers a city's public policy record into a knowledge base you can question.

Explore the four stages ↓
Discovery pipeline at a glance
The Grapevine discovery process.
Click to expand any stage to see details and examples.
Municipal websites
City, county, and state pages: climate plans, ordinances, progress reports, agendas — the authoritative core.
Social media & video channels
City-run channels stream council meetings and public sessions — open debate, as it happens.
Local & national news
Local outlets cover day-to-day governance; national ones add patterns, funding, and context the city won't publish.
Policy lexicon
The key agencies, programs, officials, and milestones that define the topic.
Relevance scoring
Each source is ranked by how much it actually covers the right places, programs, and people.
Human review
A researcher reviews the top candidates by hand — confirming they're useful and adding missed context.
Reports & plans (PDF)
Climate plans, progress reports, and GHG inventories — converted to structured text, tables and headings intact.
Web pages
Department and program pages, stripped of nav, ads, and boilerplate down to the main content.
Meeting videos (YouTube)
Council sessions and briefings, transcribed with speaker labels and timestamps — every quote links to playback.
Indexed knowledge base
Every source is split into passages and indexed, so any sentence is findable by what it says.
Cited retrieval
A question returns the exact passages that answer it, each linked to its source page or video timestamp.
Grapevine Policy Bot
The dashboard chatbot answers from the same passages — and never strays from the source.