BusinessRecordOS · part of The Local Internet
HOW DOES ONE BUSINESS RECORD WORK?
One Business. One Record. Underneath that record are several governed relationships and states — and they do not move in lockstep.
The operating system for the Business Record.
Every fact on this page is read from the running system when the page renders. Nothing is a stored copy, a sample record or a marketing figure.
How does one Business Record work?
A graph, not a funnel
A Business Record does not march through claim, then verification, then publication. It is one governed object with several state systems around it, and each moves on its own.
Business Record
The governed business identity the system treats as authoritative. Everything else on this page relates to it; none of it replaces it.
Organization
The record's identity as an organization, with its reviewed names, relationships to other organizations and its locations. An organization and a publication of it are not the same object.
What does not follow
Published does not mean claimed.
Records are published in this system that nobody has claimed.
Claimed does not mean verified.
A claim establishes control. Verification is decided separately, by review.
Verified does not mean claimed.
Records are verified in this system without an owner having claimed them.
A record stays authoritative when a publication ends.
Publications can end. The record they referred to is untouched.
Publication is destination-specific.
A record reaches one destination at a time, each for a recorded reason.
Promotion is not publication.
Being publicly available never means a business paid to appear.
Follow One Business Record
One real Business Record in the running system, shown state by state. If the system changes, this page changes with it.
Reading the record…
How a record reaches a public experience
Business Record
The authoritative object.
Publication reason
A recorded, reviewable reason for it to appear somewhere.
Publication
One record on one destination, while a reason stands.
Destination
A configured place in the system.
Public experience
The page a visitor reaches.
A publication exists because a reason was recorded for it. A record can have more than one legitimate reason at once, reasons can have start and end dates, and when no reason remains in effect the publication ends while the Business Record continues to exist. The reasons themselves are administrative detail and are not public.
How a record becomes authoritative
Evidence
Observations about a business, kept exactly as observed.
Candidate
A proposal that those observations describe a real business.
Independent review
A different person than the proposer decides. The system enforces the separation.
Authoritative record
Created through the same single path every other record uses — unclaimed, unverified, unpublished.
Nothing in this system reads a source and declares the result authoritative. A record becomes authoritative because a person other than the proposer decided it should.
Public data feed
Published Business Records can be read as structured data through one public read-only feed, filterable by state and category. It is a read feed and nothing more: there is no way to create, update or synchronize a Business Record through it.
/api/public/records
What this page is not
- Not a second Business Record database. Every record shown already exists in the shared system.
- Not a score. The system calculates no quality, health or visibility score for a business.
- Not an agent. Nothing here maintains, corrects or synchronizes a record on its own.
- Not a knowledge graph. The system holds reviewed relationships between records, and says only that.
- Not a developer API. One public read feed exists; there is no write access of any kind.
- Not a dashboard. Managing a record happens at OneBusinessRecord, not here.