The Data are here.
They are only
not networked.
Austria has more public databases than any single person can survey: RIS, Ediktsdatei, Parliament, company register, BBG, lobby register, WiEReG, Ombudsman, Court of Audit, ministerial reports, municipal minutes, EU registers, transparency databases, GIS zoning, land register. Most of it is public. None of it is networked.
The Offene Kataster is the tool that does this networking. Automated. Scientifically reproducible. Legally citable. Modularly extensible. Self-optimizing. From the municipal council meeting to the EU subsidy recipient — all crawlable, all linkable, all made visible as patterns.
This tool is no project with an operator. It is a specification, a reference implementation, a modularly extensible system. AGPL. Anyone can fork, host, extend, adapt it for their own region. No central instance, no owners, no kill switch.
What the tool does — and how.
Five principles that shape every function of the tool. They are not trimmings — they are the tool.
Twelve areas. Full coverage.
Each domain has its own crawlers, its own pattern rules, its own reference cases. All linked via a shared entity graph. From the municipal council to the EU Commission — nothing beyond reach, nothing beyond transparency.
What the tool concretely finds.
Every pattern that follows is technically derivable from public data already available today. All formulated as hypotheses — to be checked, not to be condemned.
One winner, one awarding body
Notable is, that company X has received more than 65% of its contract volume from a single regional authority Y over 5 years. No other comparable company receives anywhere near similar volumes from Y. To be checked: Competition procedures, tender conditions, structural proximity, managing-director connections.
Rezoning follows acquisition (or vice versa)
A pattern suggests, that in municipality Z, in 11 of 47 rezoning procedures over the last 10 years, a council member or a person in their close circle either acquired or sold ownership rights to the affected parcel within ±24 months. To be checked: Bias, acceptance of advantage, insider information.
Party-asymmetric immunity practice
Statistically conspicuous is that between 2010 and 2025, extradition requests against members of party A were rejected in X% of cases, while a comparable rate of Y% applies for party B. To be checked: Offense typology, procedural course, principle of equal treatment.
Mortality anomaly in a small region
Statistically conspicuous is a mortality raised by N standard deviations (ICD-10 class K) in region R over 6 years, without correlation to age cohorts or known environmental factors. To be checked: Trade licenses in the region, water/air readings, contaminated-sites register.
Judicial practice deviating from the median
A pattern suggests, that senate S at court G shows an acquittal rate roughly 40% higher than comparable senates across 500 decisions in offense group D. To be checked: Case-file situation, structural reasons (jurisdiction, file allocation), consistency of case law.
Serial insolvencies with person continuity
Notable isfirms in the same sector, with creditor damages over X million euros. To be checked: Shell-company abuse, challenge under insolvency law, criminal relevance §§ 156, 159 StGB.
Lobbying correlates with legislation
A connection between between a lobbying registration in sector S and a legislative initiative in the same sector within 12 months appears in K cases. Beneficiary firms: F1, F2. To be checked: substantive influence, transparency of MP contacts, § 6 LobbyG.
Diverging supreme-court case law
Notable is, that OGH and VwGH apply systematically different standards over N years in structurally comparable legal questions in subject area X. CJEU and ECtHR have taken line L in comparable cases. To be checked: Divergence template, fundamental-rights aspect, possible treaty breach.
Advertising density correlates with reporting
A pattern suggests, that media company M shows a statistically altered tonality in its reporting about a client during peak phases of public advertising placement by a ministry/state government/municipality. To be checked: Media-freedom relevance, § 26 MedienG, funding criteria.
Recurring criticism of the same authority
Statistically conspicuous is that authority B appears in 7 consecutive annual Ombudsman reports with substantially the same criticism, without implementation of the recommendations. Addressed in parallel in Court-of-Audit report J/K. To be checked: Refusal to reform, political responsibility, civil-rights systemic risk.
Rule vs. reality. System vs. practice.
The actual state of a polity reveals itself in its contradictions: where which rule applies, where it is suspended, who profits from the grey zone. The tool systematically juxtaposes these contradictions — across categories, traceably, with source citations.
There the system reveals itself.
Those without a voice are the most vulnerable. People under adult representation, care homes, correctional facilities, children in institutions, asylum seekers in care. When the system fails here, it fails most clearly — and no one reports it. The tool needs a dedicated, especially cautious mode here.
Guardianship / adult representation
In 2018, guardianship was replaced by the Adult-protection legislation replaced — four levels: chosen, statutory, judicial adult representation plus advance directive. The system is unsurveyable: who represents whom in what respect, who checks the representatives, who protects the affected from their representatives?
Actual exercise is carried out by the three representation associations (ÖBV, VertretungsNetz, NÖLV) and by lawyer guardians. Annual accountability toward the guardianship court is formal, in practice often paper. Asset management, residence decisions, medical-treatment decisions are made about people who cannot defend themselves.
What the tool can do here — and must not do: Do not spotlight individual affected people. Name no names. Never reveal the identity of the protected persons. But structural check: representation clusters of individual lawyers, home-transfer patterns, cost explosions in individual cases, complaint clusters against individual representatives, judges with strikingly many appointments to particular associations.
Detainees, children in institutions, asylum in care
The principle is the same: structural check without individual data.
Modular. Extensible. Federated.
The tool is not a monolith. Each domain is a module, each module can run on its own, have its own crawler, its own rules. Modules communicate via a shared entity graph. New domains can be added without touching the core system.
What all forks must uphold.
These rules are part of the license. Anyone who forks the tool or parts of it commits to them. Violations void the license — with a cease-and-desist claim against the infringing instance.
Realistic phases.
- Finalize PostgreSQL schema incl. provenance constraints
- Expand institution register to 2,000 entries
- Modules RIS, Ediktsdatei, Parliament production-ready
- FastAPI base, Rule-02 validator active
- Test-case suite for all pattern detectors
- BBG/TED crawler with award-concentration detector
- Court-of-Audit report parser (PDF+NLP)
- Lobbyreg + EU transparency register
- Media funding and advertising register
- Contradiction engine v1 with first 10 rule-pair templates
- OCR pipeline for municipal-council PDFs (Tesseract + layout parser)
- Template-based extraction per municipal software vendor
- Land-register integration (funded access for research)
- GIS zoning of all 9 states
- Rezoning-insider detector
- Representation-association interface (aggregate only, no individual data)
- Guardianship-court statistics aggregated
- Ombudsman reports structurally linked
- Structural checks without individual research
- Legal review by adult-protection experts
- EUR-Lex full-text integration
- curia.europa.eu + hudoc.echr.coe.int case law
- Agricultural and structural-fund recipients cross-linked to AT firms
- CJEU ↔ OGH/VwGH divergence detector
- Cross-border contract flows
- Outcome tracking: which hypotheses confirmed, which refuted
- Confidence-score adjustment per detector
- False-positive suppression pipeline
- Public pattern review with rectification workflow
- Community contributions (new detectors, institution-register extensions)