Methodology

This page states how the data on this site is obtained, what it establishes, and what it does not. It is written to be held against the Observatory: if a record does not match what is written here, the record is wrong.

What the Observatory publishes

References to regulatory texts: the official title, the type of act, the number, the date and the precision of that date, the jurisdiction, the language of publication, and the link to the source. Nothing is displayed that does not come from a document published by an official authority.

No opinion, no interpretation, no commentary. No unpublished information. No data obtained other than by consulting sources open to everyone.

Where the data comes from

From the websites of the regulatory authorities of the jurisdictions followed, and from official gazettes where these are online. What each portal allowed us to collect, and what stood in the way, is published on the “Portal status” page: the coverage of this site depends on what the portals publish, and that dependence is made visible rather than passed over.

How it is collected

By two routes, and two only. Manual recording from official pages, where the portal allows nothing else. And automated collection that reads and obeys each site’s robots.txt file, identifies itself by name and contact address, spaces out its requests, and visits no disallowed page. No protection mechanism is circumvented, no session is usurped, no private area is reached.

Scanned documents — images of pages, with no text to extract — go through optical character recognition. The resulting text is not corrected: automatic correction would manufacture words that were not in the document. The origin of every full text is recorded in the database, including the tool used.

The date of the last contact with the source appears on every record. It states that, on that date, the address answered — or that it did not. It says nothing about the content of the text, and nothing about its applicability.

What status means

The Observatory never asserts that a text is still applicable. The customary phrase that would say so is banned from its labels: no page of this site can produce it, and a check goes through every generated page on each pass to make sure of it. That check rejected the first version of this very paragraph, which quoted the phrase in order to say that it did not use it.

A record states what is on record: that a later act repeals this text, that a later act amends it, or that no contrary act is on record to date. This last form is the most common, and the weakest: it means that the Observatory is not aware of a contrary act, not that it has verified the text’s present scope. Where a repeal is known but its date is not known precisely, the record shows the bounds and does not decide.

The precision of dates

Not every source dates to the day. A date known to the year is shown as such, and never completed with a plausible day or month. An unknown date is declared unknown. Precision is data in its own right: it is stored, and the shape of the date must match it.

The regulatory subject

Each text is attached to a subject — interconnection, spectrum, universal service, data protection, and so on. That attachment is a qualification task, carried out text by text. Until it is done, the record shows “not yet qualified”: it does not guess, and it does not hide the heading.

Languages

The interface is translated. The substance is not: official titles, act numbers and article references remain in the language of publication of their source. Translating them would create a reference that exists in no official gazette and that no one could cite.

What this site does not cover

Coverage is uneven, and the site shows this rather than hiding it: a jurisdiction with no recorded text still appears, with a statement saying so. The corpus is not exhaustive. It replaces neither the official gazette nor the authority’s website, which alone are authoritative.

Reporting an error

An inaccurate reference, a stale link, a missing text: reports are useful and they are acted on. The address appears on the “About” page.