Philadelphia publishes a remarkable amount of public data. It just publishes it in pieces — payroll here, assessments there, permits in a third system, violations in a fourth, none of them speaking to each other. ALKARTIS connects those pieces into a single explainable engine, reachable through one API, so your team queries the city as one dataset instead of stitching a dozen together.
The value isn't any single feed — it's that they're joined. Through the ALKARTIS Intelligence Engine your team reaches Philadelphia's core public records as connected records:
City contracts and vendor payments are on the way through ContractSignal, which is still in development — we'll fold that in as it comes online rather than claim it before it's ready.
Anyone can download a permit file. The difficulty is that Philadelphia's records don't agree with themselves about who's who. A single landlord might hold property under a half-dozen LLCs, each spelled slightly differently, each with a different mailing address, appearing under one name in the assessment roll and another in the licensing data. Trace that by hand and you'll miss most of the footprint.
ALKARTIS resolves those identities across datasets, so an owner, a property, or a city employee reads as one connected entity. That's what turns a payroll export into a career history, and a permit search into a real picture of who is building what, where.
The API doesn't just return rows. It returns a connected answer — and a trail back to the public records behind every value in it.
Because the data is unified, a single integration supports questions that would otherwise each require their own pipeline: how a department's overtime has moved since 2016, which blocks are seeing a surge in permit valuations, how an owner's assessments compare across a portfolio, where eviction filings and 311 complaints cluster together. Your engineers integrate once; your analysts ask broadly.
Philadelphia's records reward looking across years, not just at the present. Payroll runs from 2016 forward, so a title, a department, or an individual can be followed quarter by quarter — how staffing shifted, where overtime accumulated, how a career moved. Assessments and permit valuations carry their own history, which is what lets you separate a one-off spike from a genuine trend on a block. Because ALKARTIS keeps that time depth connected rather than flattening everything to a current-state view, a single query can reach both what is true now and how it got there.
That temporal spine also makes the data resilient to the city's own revisions. When a source system restates a value, the connected record reflects the change while preserving the trail, so your analysis rests on the record as it actually stands rather than a stale copy you'd have to re-pull and re-reconcile by hand.
Every figure the API returns carries its source lineage. This is deliberate: ALKARTIS is built for work where a number has to survive scrutiny — a published investigation, a filed assessment appeal, a diligence memo, a policy brief. You should never have to take a value on faith, and with ALKARTIS you don't. The path from data to information to intelligence is visible end to end.
API access is part of the ALKARTIS Enterprise tier — there's no public self-serve API to sign up for. Instead we work with your team to scope the datasets, query patterns, refresh needs, and delivery format that fit your workflow, then provision access. ALKARTIS is live in Philadelphia today; as we expand city by city, new markets join the same engine and the same API, so the integration you build now grows with our coverage.
The engine connects city payroll from 2016 to the present, OPA property assessments, L&I permits and construction valuations, code violations, rental licensing, eviction filings, and 311 service requests. These are joined and entity-resolved rather than delivered as separate raw feeds. City contracts and vendor payments are coming via ContractSignal, which is still in development.
API access to the ALKARTIS Intelligence Engine is part of the Enterprise tier. There is no self-serve API signup. We scope the datasets, query patterns, and delivery format your team needs, then provision access. Talk to our team to get started.
Public records identify the same owner in inconsistent ways — different LLC names, spellings, and mailing addresses across assessment, licensing, and violation data. ALKARTIS links those identities so a single owner's full footprint reads as one connected picture instead of scattered, unrelated records.
ALKARTIS is live in Philadelphia today. We are expanding city by city, and as new cities come online they join the same engine and the same API — so an integration you build for Philadelphia extends to new markets as coverage grows, rather than being rebuilt each time.
Yes. Every figure the API returns traces back to a checkable public record. That source lineage is what makes ALKARTIS data usable for journalism, appeals, diligence, and policy work where a claim has to hold up to scrutiny.
Tell us what your team needs to pull and how you'd consume it. We'll scope Enterprise API access to the connected Philadelphia engine around your workflow.