Source methodology
Last updated
Civena’s answers rely on a structured rule set linked to official Swiss sources. This page describes how that rule set is built and maintained.
Selection
Official sources come first: federal law on Fedlex, federal portals such as ch.ch, federal offices, and cantonal and communal websites. Public APIs and structured data are preferred over page retrieval. Retrieval respects robots rules and site terms, with low request rates.
Verification
Each rule records its conditions, the obligation, the deadline and its basis (legal, official guidance or recommendation), the responsible authority, and the official sources with a short verbatim excerpt and verification date. Only rules with at least one Tier-1 source can be marked verified. Unverified rules are shown as “needs verification”.
Language
The source language is stored separately. Civena may answer in your language while citing a German, French or Italian source.
Freshness
Sources are re-checked on a schedule — laws about monthly, portals and cantonal pages more often. Content changes are detected by comparing versions; affected rules are flagged for review and high-risk rules are never changed automatically.
Conflicts and corrections
When sources conflict, the official Tier-1 source prevails and the case goes to human review. Anyone can report incorrect information from any answer; reports go to the review queue.