| name | data-discovery |
| description | Find and vet a government source before adding any number to the dashboard. Use when sourcing a new KPI, comparator, Government Order, or Status-Paper figure — turns "I need a number" into "I have an official, linkable source". |
Data discovery
Every figure on this dashboard must trace to an official government source
(see docs/data/source-policy.md). This
skill is how you find one and confirm it before writing a fixture.
Steps
- Check what we already catalogued. Read the per-domain inventory in
docs/data/ (e.g. fiscal.md, health.md) and the
typed registry data/sources.ts. The source may
already be listed.
- Go to the primary body, not coverage. Prefer, in order: the issuing
department (
*.kerala.gov.in / *.gov.in), a constitutional/statutory body
(RBI, CAG, ECI, Census, MoSPI), the Legislative Assembly
(niyamasabha.org), then data.gov.in. A newspaper or aggregator is only a
lead to the underlying official document — never the source of record.
- Get a resolvable URL to the exact document/page (a PDF, a table, a
dataset). Note the precise table/figure number — provenance must be specific
(
Table 3.1b, not "the report").
- Record retrieval. Capture the
retrievedAt/lastRefreshed timestamp
(ISO with +05:30).
- Verify it passes the gate. Run
deno task check:sources. If the host
isn't on the government allowlist, you have the wrong source — go back to 2.
Reliability ladder (best → unacceptable)
Issuing department → constitutional/statutory body → Assembly →
national open-data portal → (stop: below this line is not a source of record)
→ think-tank / aggregator (PRS, OpenBudgets, Dataful) → newspaper → Wikipedia /
blog / social.
Output
A { source, sourceUrl, retrievedAt } triple ready to drop into the fixture,
plus the exact table/figure citation. If you cannot find an official source, the
number does not ship — open a tracking note instead.
Related
