Find the Factory organizes what public records actually say about companies and products. Every relationship has a source, a role and a limit.
1. Preserve the evidence
Collectors store the fetched source privately before parsing. Each payload has a content hash and an observation timestamp. Updated records create a new filing version; previous assertions are retained. Public pages show a source link and allowlisted business facts, never raw payloads or personal contact lists.
2. Keep different identities separate
Organisations, brands, products and physical facilities are different concepts. A product identity is scoped to its source and external identifier. A certificate number identifies a certificate, not automatically a company. We do not turn a company address into a manufacturing facility without explicit evidence.
3. Resolve conservatively
Normalization standardizes spacing, Unicode and punctuation. Explicit, typed organisation identifiers can establish a shared identity. Name matches between sources create review candidates. Corporate suffixes and translations are not sufficient evidence of equivalence. Reviewed joins are reversible and never overwrite historical assertions.
4. Preserve the recorded role
Manufacturer, applicant, importer, packager, labeler, laboratory and certificate holder are separate roles. “Source-declared” means a source made the assertion; it is not an independent factory audit or a statistical confidence score. Ownership remains unknown until supported separately.
5. Measure observations honestly
A first observation in our system is not a launch. Importing older records is a backfill. A changed filing does not prove a factory gained or lost a client. Counts describe collected records, and different registers count different things. We do not use filing counts as sales, shipments or market share.
6. Show coverage and freshness
We publish successful collection times and source limits. A failed fetch or empty parser result is not evidence of deletion. Initial adapters collect bounded samples, so absence from search has limited meaning. We expand collection only after checking schema, access, accuracy and use conditions.
Corrections
If a record is incorrect, contact darius@moatventure.com with the source URL and the specific correction. We preserve the distinction between correcting our interpretation and a registry changing its own record.
Inspect source coverage ↗