Gwinnett Index
A machine-readable index of zoning, land-use, and development records for Gwinnett County, Georgia and its 17 municipalities. Built for AI agents first, humans second.
Why this exists
A "Duluth, GA" mailing address is usually not in the City of Duluth. It's in unincorporated Gwinnett — a different code, a different board, a different permit portal. Nothing on the internet resolves an address to its governing jurisdiction before answering a zoning question, so every AI assistant answering "what's the setback in Duluth GA" today is guessing.
Unincorporated Gwinnett is 67.3% of the county's land area. Getting this wrong is the default, not the edge case.
What's here
| Dataset | Records | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Jurisdiction boundaries | 19 (county + unincorporated + 17 cities) | US Census TIGER — public domain |
| County zoning cases | 11,739 (1970–2026) | Gwinnett GC_Planning ArcGIS |
| Resolved applicants | 7,369 (from 8,246 raw spellings) | derived |
| Duluth UDC | 860 sections, 18 tables | city PDF, 426 pp |
| Duluth meeting documents | 356 (7,878 pp, 2023–2026) | duluthga.net |
| Duluth land-use cases | 109 distinct, 64 with vote records | agenda mining |
Setup — one time
The repo already has a starter README, so clone first and copy in — that avoids a push conflict:
git clone https://github.com/willmobhill-arch/gwinnett-index.git
tar -xzf gwinnett-index-repo.tar.gz -C gwinnett-index # overwrites the stub README
cd gwinnett-index
git add -A && git commit -m "Gwinnett Index: pipeline, schema, and extracted corpora"
git push
Then, with the repo public, load the corpora. Postgres fetches them itself — you don't run anything locally, and no credential is involved:
-- set to your repo's raw base
-- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/willmobhill-arch/gwinnett-index/main/data/
SELECT load_udc_sections_from_url(
'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/willmobhill-arch/gwinnett-index/main/data/udc_sections.jsonl');
SELECT * FROM load_duluth_cases_from_url(
'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/willmobhill-arch/gwinnett-index/main/data/duluth_cases.jsonl');
SELECT load_meeting_docs_from_url(
'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/willmobhill-arch/gwinnett-index/main/data/duluth_meeting_docs.jsonl');
Expected: 860 sections, 228 case rows (109 distinct), 356 meeting documents.
Architecture
Ingestion runs inside Postgres via the http extension — it fetches the
county's ArcGIS REST services, Census TIGERweb, and this repo's own raw URLs
directly. No external worker, no credentials in transit, and the whole 11,739-case
county load moves zero bytes through a client.
ingest/
duluth/ UDC PDF -> 860 sections + 18 tables (extract_udc, extract_tables)
duluth_agendas/ crawl -> OCR -> parse case items from agendas/minutes/packets
scripts/ standalone loaders for environments with direct PG access
data/ extracted corpora, fetched by the SQL loaders above
docs/plans/ design doc, build plan, status
The adapter pattern
17 jurisdictions cannot be 17 hand-written scrapers. The vendor landscape consolidates hard — Municode, ArcGIS REST, CivicPlus, CivicClerk, BS&A, Accela — so roughly six adapters cover ~90% of them, and adding a city is a config file. Health metric: if a new city needs new code rather than a new config, the adapter layer is leaking.
Data quality, stated honestly
- Jurisdiction resolver: scored on 1,915 probe points from the county's own
zoning layers. At
confidence='high'it is correct 1,546/1,546 — 100%. Every error falls inside the low-confidence band. All 22 disagreements were within 141 m of a boundary (annexation lag; Census updates yearly). - Duluth UDC: 97.3% raw text coverage; the gap is stripped heading lines, leaving 591 unexplained characters across 426 pages.
- UDC Table 2-B (dimensional standards) is verified cell-for-cell against the rendered source page. The other 17 tables are extracted but not spot-checked, and Table 2-B's merged PUD/CBD rows remain unreliable. Flags are in the data.
- Duluth minutes: 57–69% are scanned with no text layer (printed, signed,
re-scanned). OCR text is stored separately with
text_source='ocr'and is a reconstruction, never a quotation of the record. - Applicant resolution: 271 variants merged on tight edit distance; 262 lower-confidence pairs are queued for human review rather than merged on a guess. A split entity is visibly wrong; a wrongly merged one looks authoritative and is invisible.
Legal posture
| Content | Posture | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinance / plan text | Mirror in full | Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org (2020) — edicts of government |
| Case records | Mirror in full | Facts; Georgia Open Records Act |
| County parcel/zoning geometry | Proxy only, never rehost | Gwinnett GIS licence forbids redistribution |
| Jurisdiction boundaries | Host | US Census TIGER — public domain |
| IBC/IRC base text | Never | ICC copyright; index Georgia amendments only |
This index is a mirror and derived analysis, not the system of record. Every
record carries source_url and last_verified.
Published under CC0.