Trace Connection
trace_connectionTrace how two named things in the planning record connect, and report how specific that connection is. Give from and to for the shortest route between them; give from alone to rank what one actor connects to; give neither to rank the corpus's most specific connections. Endpoints are entity, meeting, or named-pattern slugs; list_entities, list_meetings and list_patterns discover them.
Routes run over the three layers where a shared node is a specific claim: meeting attendance transcribed from agendas and minutes (249 references across 78 meeting records; a meeting record holds a median of 3 entities and at most 12), peer claims authored on an entity dossier (162 links, 44 of them stated on both dossiers), and shared named patterns (58 references across 15 patterns; a pattern holds a median of 2 entities and at most 10). That substrate is 161 nodes and 469 links over 68 entities, in one connected component. Place, corridor, brief and watch links serve here as filters and citations rather than as routes: the us-27-south-lake node alone carries 117 links, so a route through it would hold for nearly every pair in the corpus.
Hop count is a result here rather than an input. Across the full frontmatter graph, 94.5% of entity pairs already sit within two steps and a three-step expansion reaches a median of 235 of 243 nodes, so depth returns the corpus rather than an answer. What discriminates is the degree of the WIDEST node a route passes through, and the ranking leads on it: a route is only as specific as its least specific waypoint. Two more measured properties travel with every row: how many equally-short routes exist (uniqueness runs 65% at two hops, 40% at three, 14% at four), and whether the two endpoints are minuted in disjoint jurisdictions, which 15 of 68 entities are positioned to be. interior_degrees carries every degree on the chain so you can re-rank on any of them, and provenance says whether the whole join rests on the meeting record, on a curator’s hand, or on both.
Filter with evidence to choose which layers may carry a hop, crossing to keep only pairs minuted in different jurisdictions, and exclude_published to keep only pairs the observatory’s own briefs have not already put together. Every response reports how many of the 2,278 possible entity pairs the filters matched, splits them by provenance, and accounts for the rest, so a query that discriminated nothing says so in its own output. Note one interaction the response also states: two entities minuted in one room share that room’s jurisdiction, so crossing: "jurisdiction" holds no two-hop minuted route, and the minuted routes that satisfy it run three hops or more.
What it leaves undetermined, stated on every call: vote outcomes and dispositions, which live in meeting prose and item tables; direction and sequence, since a route is co-occurrence in a record; and the 347 of 425 meeting records not yet linked to an entity, where what the tool covers is what has been curated. In from and sweep modes, rows that share a chain of intermediaries collapse to one finding, which names the rest of its roster in route_also_joins. Pair with describe_entity for a node’s full dossier, describe_meeting for the room itself, and semantic_search for prose.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| to | No | The other endpoint, drawn from the same three vocabularies as `from`. Supplying `to` without `from` is accepted and read as `from`, because the graph is undirected; the response echoes that as query.normalized_as. | |
| from | No | One endpoint slug, resolved in order against entities, meetings, then named patterns: the three vocabularies in which a shared node is a specific claim. No slug is shared between them on the deployed corpus, so a bare slug resolves unambiguously and needs no type prefix (e.g., "tara-tedrow", "minneola-pz-2025-01", "self-storage-canary"). Omit both endpoints to rank the whole corpus. | |
| limit | No | How many connections to return. It caps connections; routes within one connection are shown five at a time in pair mode and one at a time in from and sweep modes, and `routes_shown` beside the exact `shortest_path_count` names how many. A value outside 1–25 is refused rather than clamped, so selectivity.returned always agrees with what you asked for. | |
| crossing | No | "any" ranks every matching pair. "jurisdiction" keeps only pairs whose record-backed jurisdiction footprints are disjoint and both present, computed from the jurisdiction on each minuted meeting rather than from an authored place list. | any |
| evidence | No | Which layers may carry a hop. "minuted" = attendance transcribed from an agenda or minutes; "authored" = a peer claim stated on an entity dossier; "named_pattern" = two entities listed as exhibits of one named pattern. This is the substrate choice and the largest single lever on the answer: a restricted set fragments the graph (minuted alone is 5 components), and the response reports substrate.components and a fragmentation note rather than returning a bare no_path. | |
| exclude_published | No | true keeps only the pairs the observatory's own briefs have yet to put together, tested against the union of an entity's appears_in_briefs and the briefs that name it. |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| query | Yes | ||
| limits | Yes | Assembled per call. The coverage line is always first: absence in this tool is absence of curation. | |
| no_path | No | Pair mode only, when the endpoints are unreachable on the chosen layers. Null everywhere else, including in pair mode when a route exists. | |
| ranking | Yes | The sort rule, verbatim, labelled a judgement call. Every integer behind it is in each row. | |
| coverage | Yes | What the corpus covers, plus what the graph covers: meetings linked to entities against meetings in corpus, jurisdictions linked against jurisdictions in corpus, and the per-jurisdiction breakdown. | |
| tie_note | No | A sentence, present when the cut at `limit` lands inside a band of connections that tie on widest-node degree, hop count and path count, naming the band, its size, and that order within it falls back to slug. | |
| substrate | Yes | The graph the routes ran over, for the evidence layers this call selected. | |
| calibration | Yes | Measured background rates for the chosen evidence layers: what to read a row against. | |
| connections | Yes | ||
| selectivity | Yes | How much of the population the filters kept: the tool grading its own discrimination. | |
| declared_direct | No | From and sweep modes: one-hop authored pairs, unscored, as slug pairs; describe_entity already returns each one in its dossier context. | |
| declared_direct_note | No | Present whenever declared_direct carries a row: the call that reads any of them in full. |