The Digital City is an open series explaining how Boostt assembles a usable map of a city’s service economy from building permits, professional registries, and scraped public sources. Every row has a verifiable origin in a public document. Every pin is a real event at a real address. Nothing is fabricated.
Each chapter covers one mechanism end-to-end — the intake pipeline, the profession taxonomy, the classification model, the spatial query that makes it actionable. The chapters are standalone: you can read just the one that answers your question, or the whole series in order.
This is what word of mouth looks like when it’s built from the city’s own public record instead of from ads and paid listings. “Who has actually worked near me?” is the question. Each chapter explains one piece of the answer.
A digital city is not a place you render. It is a protocol you transact through.
Every US building permit names a contractor and has a street address. This chapter walks the pipeline that reads each permit, figures out what kind of work it describes, creates or updates the contractor entity, and attaches the permit’s geo point to that contractor’s real work history — so you can find contractors who have actually done jobs near you, ranked by proof.
How any professional can build a business on the map — stays, services, experiences, opportunities — and why the route is just a default layer preset, not a constraint.
The globe is the overview screen. Each city is at a different stage of development — founders, permits, properties, services, stays, creators, businesses, opportunities. The dashboard shows what exists and what’s missing. The gap is the opportunity.
When a building permit is filed, a pin appears on the Boostt map — the property’s digital identity, connected to the public record. The developer claims the pin and gets the control plane: who viewed the property, which content drove traffic, the broker connection, the campaigns they run on it.
How Boostt keeps one unified entity model for every kind of professional on the map — and why the source of each record is always visible, so you can always see why someone appears.
Anchored to an international occupation standard (ISCO), enriched with real task descriptions from US labor data (O*NET), and designed so a plumber who also works as a general contractor is recognised as both.
The privacy model. Public records stay public, contact information stays gated, and the boundary is enforced by the database itself — not by application code that could be bypassed.