00 — README: The Government Graph Pack
version v0.33.67 date 8 September 2026 status PROPOSED. Nothing described in this pack is built. This pack is the first commit in the vault, published before the work it specifies, which is the point.
Pack hub↗ · Next → 01 — What Exists↗
The Argument, In One Paragraph
UnGovr publishes an excellent graph of government: roughly 320,000 entities across 205 countries, with hierarchy, boundaries, and a spatial join that resolves an address into every overlapping jurisdiction. Each entity carries one edge to the open-records law that governs it, and then stops. A consumer can learn which law applies and can never point at the clause that requires anything. So a claim built on their data can be about a jurisdiction and never about an obligation — and an obligation is the only thing that can carry a risk, a control or an acceptance. This vault closes that gap for one worked example, one county and one law and one acceptance, and shows what the data would need in order to be usable at scale.
This is not a criticism. That edge is exactly right for their stated purpose, which is helping a person reach their government. It is one hop short of the purpose everybody downstream has.
Reading Order
| # | File | Read it for |
|---|---|---|
| 00 | 00__README.md | This file. The argument, the scope, what not to rebuild |
| 01 | 01__what-exists.md↗ | The assembly inventory. What is already published on both sides |
| 02 | 02__the-model.md↗ | The ontology: node types, edge types, addressing, provenance, the two-edge rule |
| 03 | 03__the-worked-example.md↗ | Santa Barbara County, the CPRA, one acceptance. The seven steps |
| 04 | 04__the-vault.md↗ | The vault's own shape: the team, the viewers, the graph settings, the release channel |
| 05 | 05__the-workbench.md↗ | The bulk pipeline, the compiled artefacts, the browser database, the seven computations |
| 06 | 06__verification.md↗ | The acceptance tests, the claim-state rule, and the blockers recorded honestly |
If you read one file, read 03. It is the deliverable. Everything else exists to make it defensible.
What Is Already Built And Must Not Be Rebuilt
This is the finding that should set the size of the work. The demonstration is assembly plus one new join, not a build.
| Already published | Where | Do not rebuild |
|---|---|---|
| A law rendered as a semantic graph with a contribution path | Standards Atlas (GDPR) vault | The pattern for law-as-graph |
| A law parsed from official XML into an evidence graph, article by article | Regulation Graph (EU AI Act) vault | The parse-to-provision pipeline |
| A conformance layer computing a judgement over a graph of requirements | AIUC-1 vault | The requirement → subject → evidence separation |
A public graph app whose app.json requests no permissions | Risk Graph Explorer vault | The shareable read-only form |
| SQLite in the browser over an eleven-step acceptance walk | The published risk-acceptance vault | The in-browser query pattern |
| An instrument at 1,523 nodes and 1,944 edges with two-hash addressing | standards.sgit.ai v0.1.4 | The addressing scheme |
| Byte-for-byte rebuild of source from graph, quotes verified on every build | graphs.sgit.ai | The provenance discipline |
What is new is exactly two things: the entity-to-instrument join (steps 1→2 of the worked example), and the coverage measurement of UnGovr's own law edge. Everything below step 2 has been done twice for other instruments.
The Success Criterion
One sentence. A stranger opens a link, sees a named real government entity resolved from a published slug, follows it to a clause of an actual law, sees the obligation that clause creates, sees what would satisfy it, sees at what evidence tier, sees who accepted the residual risk — and at every node can see the bytes it came from and the date they were retrieved.
And the negative criterion, which is the one that will be checked first. At no point can a reader confuse a node that came from UnGovr's data with a node that is our model. See 02__the-model.md↗, the two-edge rule.
Scope: One County, One Law, One Acceptance
Santa Barbara County, California. The California Public Records Act. One acceptance.
Santa Barbara because it is the city behind UnGovr's own published measurement — that 40.7 per cent of addresses written "Santa Barbara, CA" fall outside the city limits — so the example lands on ground they have already done fieldwork on. The CPRA because it is the records law their entity edge points at for Californian bodies.
Refuse to widen it. Every reader of this pack will want to model all 398 records laws, or all 205 countries, or the whole entity graph. One instrument modelled properly beats forty sketched, which is the standards site's own conclusion about itself after a year of work. A pack that tries to be a complete ontology of government ships nothing.
What This Pack Does Not Cover
| Not covered | Why |
|---|---|
| A complete ontology of government | One county, one law, one acceptance, and a refusal to widen it |
| Modelling their domain better than they do | They know government structure. The contribution is the layer below the law reference |
| A replacement for their API | The vault holds a dated snapshot and points at the live source |
| A graph database pitch | The method site says of itself that its semantic layer is designed rather than shipped. That honesty survives into this vault |
| A partnership, or any claim about what UnGovr wants | No conversation has happened. Every statement about their needs is inference from what they publish |
| The insurance chain | Three steps down from anything they do, and it is not the conversation |
Tone
This vault may be shown to the organisation whose data it uses. Write everything in it as a contribution offered, not a gap exposed. The missing edge is right for their purpose and short for ours, and both halves of that sentence must survive into every file.
And do not overclaim the semantic layer, in either direction. What is shipped is shipped; what is designed is labelled designed.
Attribution
Entity data, slugs, boundaries and law references originate with UnGovr and are used under CC BY 4.0 with attribution. This vault holds a dated snapshot and is not a replacement for their live source at data.ungovr.org/v1.
This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).