What neighbors notice, next to the public record

GroundTruth is a map for Rosslyn and the rest of Arlington. A smell, a noise, a dump site, or a fenced lot can be recorded and lined up with public environmental files. Community reports and official records use the same timeline, so a permitted facility and the people living near it can be read together.

An observation is one piece of evidence: a neighbor's report, a "same here" confirmation, or an EPA inspection. An incident groups observations about the same event by category, distance, and time. A site is a known or suspected source.

How to read a label

Official record means the row came from a government dataset, mainly EPA ECHO. It is still a record of what an agency entered, not a finding by this app.

Community reported, unverified means a person posted it. Other neighbors may confirm it, and weather or permits may line up, but the app does not declare a source. Suspected sites, including unexplained construction, keep that label until a public permit or agency record is linked.

Demo data marks the synthetic reports shipped with the hackathon build. They are realistic on purpose, and they are not real complaints.

Data sources

• EPA ECHO facility search and detailed facility reports for the Arlington bounding box.
• OpenStreetMap, via Overpass, for buildings and telecom features tagged as data centers in Northern Virginia.
• Open-Meteo for wind and precipitation at the hour of a new report. No key is required.
• A short hand-curated permit file. It is not a live Arlington County feed.
• OpenAQ is described in the code and not connected. It needs a free API key.

The demo does not call government APIs while you click around. Fetch scripts save JSON once, and the app reads that file.

Not in this build

Push notifications, native apps, image classification, photo matching, downstream water flow, an admin dashboard, and translations. Spanish is the first language to add.