Memoria Engine
A smart document management tool for researchers and journalists that automatically assembles fragmented information from various sources into coherent, explorable timelines and narratives.
Verbatim Vigil
A niche, AI-powered subscription service that scrapes and analyzes public municipal documents (e.g., city council minutes, ordinances) based on user-defined rules, delivering high-value, early-warning alerts to professionals.
Inspired by the logical robots of 'I, Robot', the data aggregation of a 'Public Services' scraper, and the three-act structure of a trick from 'The Prestige', Verbatim Vigil is an automated document intelligence system for a niche market: professionals whose success is tied to local governance (real estate developers, specialized lawyers, lobbyists, etc.).
The story is simple: these professionals currently spend countless hours manually reading dense, jargon-filled public documents to find the one sentence about a zoning change or a new regulation that could impact their business. Verbatim Vigil is their tireless, robotic assistant that watches these documents for them.
The concept follows the three acts of a magic trick:
1. The Pledge (Data Ingestion): The system presents something ordinary. It constantly scrapes public websites of specific city/county governments for newly published documents like meeting agendas, minutes, and draft ordinances. This raw, unstructured data is the 'ordinary' object.
2. The Turn (Rule-Based Analysis): The system does something extraordinary. Each user defines their own simple, strict set of 'Laws' for their Vigil AI to follow, much like Asimov's Laws of Robotics. These are not complex AI models, but specific rules.
- Example 'Laws' for a real estate developer:
- Law 1: Immediately alert me to any mention of 'zoning', 'variance', or 'land use' within a 1-mile radius of my listed properties.
- Law 2: Compare any newly proposed ordinance to its previous version and show me only the exact text that has been changed or removed.
- Law 3: Flag any document that mentions my direct competitors by name.
The AI doesn't 'understand' the document; it flawlessly executes its user-defined logic, transforming the data in secret.
3. The Prestige (Actionable Alerts): The system brings back the result, but it's not the original document. It delivers a concise, high-value alert that reveals the hidden secret. Instead of a 200-page PDF, the user gets an email or SMS: 'ALERT: Proposed zoning change from R-1 to C-2 on Elm Street, 0.5 miles from your property. See exact text change here [link].' This is the 'prestige'—the seemingly impossible insight delivered just in time, providing immense competitive value.
This project is low-cost to start (open-source scrapers, NLP libraries, and web frameworks), easy for a single individual to build, and targets a niche market willing to pay a premium subscription for information that directly translates to financial gain or risk mitigation.
The story is simple: these professionals currently spend countless hours manually reading dense, jargon-filled public documents to find the one sentence about a zoning change or a new regulation that could impact their business. Verbatim Vigil is their tireless, robotic assistant that watches these documents for them.
The concept follows the three acts of a magic trick:
1. The Pledge (Data Ingestion): The system presents something ordinary. It constantly scrapes public websites of specific city/county governments for newly published documents like meeting agendas, minutes, and draft ordinances. This raw, unstructured data is the 'ordinary' object.
2. The Turn (Rule-Based Analysis): The system does something extraordinary. Each user defines their own simple, strict set of 'Laws' for their Vigil AI to follow, much like Asimov's Laws of Robotics. These are not complex AI models, but specific rules.
- Example 'Laws' for a real estate developer:
- Law 1: Immediately alert me to any mention of 'zoning', 'variance', or 'land use' within a 1-mile radius of my listed properties.
- Law 2: Compare any newly proposed ordinance to its previous version and show me only the exact text that has been changed or removed.
- Law 3: Flag any document that mentions my direct competitors by name.
The AI doesn't 'understand' the document; it flawlessly executes its user-defined logic, transforming the data in secret.
3. The Prestige (Actionable Alerts): The system brings back the result, but it's not the original document. It delivers a concise, high-value alert that reveals the hidden secret. Instead of a 200-page PDF, the user gets an email or SMS: 'ALERT: Proposed zoning change from R-1 to C-2 on Elm Street, 0.5 miles from your property. See exact text change here [link].' This is the 'prestige'—the seemingly impossible insight delivered just in time, providing immense competitive value.
This project is low-cost to start (open-source scrapers, NLP libraries, and web frameworks), easy for a single individual to build, and targets a niche market willing to pay a premium subscription for information that directly translates to financial gain or risk mitigation.