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Data sources and methodology

The public records CityRadar is built on, how often they refresh, how raw licence and permit records become signals, and the limits of what this data can tell you.

The public record underneath

Everything on CityRadar starts as a row somebody else published. We do not create business data; we read the City of Calgary’s open data portal every day, work out what changed, and keep a snapshot of the raw record behind every claim we make. If a fact on a profile cannot be traced to one of these, it does not go on the page.

Calgary open data (Alberta)

Contact enrichment sources

  • Google Places
  • The business’s own website
  • Web search

These find phone numbers, emails and websites; the licence record never contains them. How each is used, and what the labels on a value mean, is on the contact data page.

What happens each day

Every morning, before the business day in the city we are reading.

The raw record is kept first
New and changed rows are stored verbatim before anything is interpreted, so every claim on the site can be traced back to the row it came from. That original row is what we go back to when something looks wrong.
Records become businesses
The same premises spelled two ways is one business, not two, and permits are matched to the address they were actually issued for — down to the unit, not just the building. Operators running several locations are identified so branches can be kept out of the new-business feed by default.
Categories you can check

ten categories

The licence record is mapped into CityRadar’s categories by explicit rules rather than guesswork, and each business records how its category was decided. Anything that cannot be placed confidently is labelled Unknown / Needs Review rather than guessed into a category.
Changes become dated events
With the evidence attached — described in full on signals explained.
Contacts are found afterwards
The licence record never contains a phone number or an email, so recently licensed businesses without contacts are looked up from the public sources above. There is a deliberate daily limit, which is why a very new business may take a few days to gain a phone number.

The two guards worth knowing about

Both exist because a wrong lead costs more than a missing one.

  • Re-issued licences are not new businesses. When a licence is issued under a fresh number to a business already recorded at the same name and address, the record is indistinguishable from a genuine opening on its own. We compare against the existing history and suppress the “new business” signal, so a restaurant that has traded since 2005 does not arrive as this week’s lead.
  • Chain locations are labelled, not silently dropped. A franchise’s eleventh outlet is a real event but a different kind of lead, so it is relabelled and hidden from the default lists rather than deleted — and it stays in search, on its own profile, and in the exports.

What this data cannot tell you

  • A licence is not an opening. It can be issued weeks before the doors open, or after, and no licence dataset knows when a business actually started trading. Permits do not settle it either: Calgary publishes them long after the work, so a permit at a licensed premises tells you money was spent there, not that the doors are still shut.
  • An address is the licensed premises. For a home-based business that is a residential address, published by the City. We keep the city’s home-occupation flag so those can be recognised, and we would ask you to treat them accordingly.
  • Absence is not evidence. A business missing from CityRadar usually means its licence has not appeared in the published extract yet, not that it does not exist. Closure detection is built but not switched on in production, so a business still listed as active may have closed.
  • Calgary only. There is no other city in the data, and no page, export or API answer implies one.

Attribution and reuse

City of Calgary datasets are published as open data under the City’s own terms; each page and API response names the datasets it drew on. We record the source of every contact value, and the CSV export prints it per row — profile pages and API responses carry the values without the labels. Our terms cover what you may do with what you take from here.