Infrastructure
HELPERG Data Infrastructure
The shared data layer behind HELPERG products: authoritative sources, normalised into stable internal models, with provenance and licensing recorded on every record.
Current status
The architecture and a first end-to-end integration are built. The APIs are internal to HELPERG and are not a public data product. No HELPERG product consumes this layer yet.
Why a shared layer
Without one, every product integrates its own providers. That means several sets of terms to comply with, several incompatible shapes for the same measurement, and no reliable way to answer where a particular number came from.
One normalised layer means a provider can be replaced without any product changing, and a question about any value has a single place to go for an answer.
How data moves
- Authoritative-source ingestion. Data is taken from the organisation that originates it — a meteorological institute, a national statistical agency — rather than from an aggregator.
- Validation at the boundary. Third-party payloads are untrusted input. Each is checked against a schema of that provider's shape before anything is read from it.
- Normalisation. Provider structures and vocabularies are translated into HELPERG's own models. A provider's field names and codes stop at the adapter.
- Provenance. Every record carries its source, the exact endpoint, when it was fetched, when the source said it changed, which adapter version transformed it, and what may be done with it.
- Caching. Providers are queried on a schedule, never once per page view, and their own freshness headers set how long a value is held.
- Normalised ecosystem APIs. Versioned, access-controlled endpoints that HELPERG products read instead of talking to providers directly.
Domains
- Weather
- Current conditions and forecasts against a provider-independent model, including HELPERG's own condition vocabulary. Values a provider does not publish are recorded as absent, never estimated.
- Economics
- A normalised release calendar built from official statistical agency schedules. A schedule states when a statistic will appear, not what it will say, so figures and forecasts on those records are empty by construction.
- News intelligence
- Models and contracts only at this stage. The design separates a real-world event from the documents that report it, so several reports of one development are not counted as several developments. No general web scraping is performed and no publisher content is copied.
Registered sources
Every external input has a record stating who publishes it, under which licence, and whether HELPERG may pass it on. Where terms are unclear, the conservative answer applies and nothing is redistributed.
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
- Economics — release schedule — U.S. Government work (public domain)
What this layer will not do
It does not scrape publishers, reproduce copyrighted articles, or redistribute data whose terms do not permit it. It does not fill a gap with an estimate: a value that has not been published is recorded as absent, and a value served from cache is served with its real age attached.
It produces structured data. It does not publish articles automatically; anything editorial passes through a person first.