Daily Brief

A daily summary of the Edmonton public record: what Council and its committees decided and will decide, what got permitted and licensed, what the police and emergency services reported, what the courts released, the weather, and the scores. It is assembled automatically each morning from 379 verified public sources.

It is not a newsroom and does not pretend to be one. It does not do original reporting or interviews. For that, read Taproot Edmonton, CBC Edmonton and the other outlets we link to.

Machine-written summaries can be fluent and wrong. Every sentence published here has to survive four checks before it appears.

1. It must quote its source. The writing model has to attach a span copied verbatim from the source document to every sentence. If that span is not genuinely in the source, the sentence is discarded automatically.

2. Its facts must match. Every number, dollar figure, date, time, vote tally, name and address in the sentence is extracted and checked against the cited passage. "$1.2 million" and "$1,200,000" are treated as the same fact; "$1.3 million" is not.

3. A second model tries to refute it. A model from a different vendor than the one that wrote the sentence sees only the source passage and the sentence, never the first model's reasoning, and is asked to disprove it. It defaults to rejecting anything it cannot confirm.

4. High-stakes items get an editorial pass. Anything naming a private individual, anything from the courts, and the lead item are reviewed against a checklist covering publication bans, the difference between an accused and a convicted person, and defamation risk.

The important partWhen a sentence fails these checks it is removed. When a whole item fails, it is published as a headline and a link only, marked Headline only. The system is built so that its worst outcome is telling you less, never telling you something untrue.

If something here is wrong, it matters and we want to know. Email corrections@edmontondailybrief.ca. Corrections are made on the page and noted at the bottom of it.

Summaries are short, always attributed, and always linked back to the original. We do not republish other outlets' articles. Sports scores and standings are facts and are always linked to the league.

City of Edmonton datasets — permits, licences, transit disruptions, council records — are used under the City of Edmonton Open Data Terms of Use, which grant a worldwide, royalty-free licence to use, modify and distribute the data for any lawful purpose, including commercially. Those Terms travel with the data: anything here derived from them is passed on under the same Terms, with no further restrictions added. These datasets are publicly available from the City of Edmonton, and anyone can obtain them directly at data.edmonton.ca.

Provincial and federal data is used under the licences attached to each source. The City provides its data "as is" and without warranty, and is not responsible for anything published here.

Coverage gaps we know about: the Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations and the Edmonton-area First Nations publish no machine-readable feed, and neither do several of Edmonton's largest immigrant community organisations. Those communities are therefore under-represented here relative to their place in the city, and we would rather say so than quietly leave it out.