Data Provenance and Sourcing

1. What this statement is

This statement describes how the record of the visible Church kept by Ocean Edgewater, LLC is compiled, verified, dated, and corrected. It is incorporated by reference into the Terms of Sale and License and is the description against which any Dataset should be read.

It is written to be relied on. A buyer, an auditor, or an acquirer’s counsel should be able to read it and know exactly what they are getting, what they are not, and on what basis it is ours to license.

2. The sources

The record is compiled from information that the Church publishes about herself:

1. The institutions’ own public statements: diocesan and parish websites, bulletins, directories, and schedules, as published by those institutions for the public to read.
2. The published references of the Holy See, among them the Annuario Pontificio (Libreria Editrice Vaticana) and the Holy See’s own bulletins and press office releases.
3. Public reference works and open datasets whose licences permit reuse, including Wikidata and openly licensed geographic data, used to cross-check identifiers and coordinates rather than as a primary source of fact.
4. Corrections sent to us by pastors, chancery staff, and the faithful, which are treated as the highest-ranking source about the institution that sent them.

Nothing in the record is privileged, confidential, or obtained from a place it was not offered. There is no purchased consumer data in it, no data broker feed, and no personal information gathered from any source other than the public statements of the institutions themselves.

3. How it is collected

Collection is by ordinary retrieval of publicly served pages, at a rate that does not burden the servers of the parishes and dioceses concerned, honouring the robots directives and terms that those sites publish. Where a site declines automated retrieval, that decision is respected and the record either carries the fact from another public source or leaves it blank.

Where a source has been taken offline, the record retires the dead link rather than repeating it. Parish domains do lapse and fall into the hands of strangers; a link that no longer belongs to the parish is removed rather than passed on.

4. What “verified” means, and what it does not

Where a field in the record is marked verified, the mark rests on a receipt: a specific source document, from the institution’s own published statements, retrieved on a recorded date and retained with the record. Verification is an assertion about provenance and recency, not a guarantee of present truth. A Mass time verified against a parish bulletin in June is a true report of what that bulletin said in June.

Where a field is unverified, it carries a source but no recent receipt. Where it is blank, no confident source was found.

A blank means “not established.” It never means “does not exist,” and it is never filled with an estimate, an inference, or a plausible invention. This is the governing rule of the record and the reason its coverage figures are lower than they could be made to look.

Scale is stated as over a floor rather than as a false-precise count, because the visible Church changes faster than any record of her: parishes merge, sees fall vacant, schedules change with the seasons.

5. Dating and currency

Every Dataset carries a catalog date and is a cut of a living record as at that date. It is not a subscription, it does not update itself, and no representation is made about the accuracy of any value after that date. Any figure quoted anywhere on this site is a figure as at a stated date.

6. What is owned, and what is not

We claim no ownership of any fact. That a parish stands at a given address, that a see is held by a given bishop, that Mass is offered at a given hour: these are facts about the world, and facts are not owned by anyone.

What is owned is the compilation: the selection of what is included and excluded, the verification applied and recorded, the typing and normalization of fields into a common schema, the resolution of entities and the links drawn between them, the identifiers and ontology under which the record is published, the arrangement and structure of the whole, and the documentation that accompanies it. That original selection and arrangement is protected as a compilation under 17 U.S.C. § 103 and the corresponding law of other jurisdictions, and it is protected as against licensees by the contract terms they accept.

We assert no rights over, and grant no rights in, third-party material that retains its own licence, including openly licensed reference data used for cross-checking and any diocesan arms or marks displayed on this site, which remain the property of the sees that bear them and are shown for identification only.

7. What this record is not

It is a work of the lay faithful. It is not an official publication of the Holy See, of any episcopal conference, or of any diocese, it carries no ecclesiastical approbation, and it binds no one. Where it differs from a diocese’s own statements, the diocese is right.

It is not a consumer report and is not compiled to the standards of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. It is not a directory of individuals, and it must not be used to make a decision about any individual’s eligibility for credit, insurance, employment, or housing.

8. Correction

The record is corrected without complaint wherever it is found wanting. Pastors, diocesan staff, and any of the faithful who find an error are asked to write to [email protected]. A correction from an institution about itself outranks every other source the record has, and is applied to the live record on receipt.

A correction applies to the living record from the date it is made. It cannot reach a Dataset already delivered to a customer, which remains a true copy of the record as at its catalog date. Where a correction is material and recent, we will say so to a customer who asks.

An institution that wishes its contact details removed from the record entirely may say so, and we will remove them. See section 9 of the Privacy Policy.