How Frontlines Watchdesk works
Public-source signals are matched against business watch items, then routed into an auditable operator workflow.
Source hierarchy
Frontlines prioritizes official government, UN, and institutional sources ahead of multi-source discovery feeds. Social scraping, noisy unofficial channels, and opaque providers are deliberately excluded from the MVP.
| Source | Coverage | Interval |
|---|---|---|
| GDELT | Discovery feed for global conflict, protest, disaster, and infrastructure reporting. | 15m |
| GDACS | UN/EU disaster awareness and coordination alerts for major hazards. | 15m |
| USGS | Programmatic GeoJSON feeds for recent earthquake events. | 5m |
| NASA FIRMS | Near-real-time fire and hotspot detections from MODIS and VIIRS. | 30m |
| NWS | Open weather alerts, forecasts, and observations API for the United States. | 5m |
| ReliefWeb | Humanitarian reports and updates curated from thousands of sources. | 15m |
Signal and impact scoring
| Factor | Weight |
|---|---|
| Source quality | 30 |
| Signal diversity | 20 |
| Severity | 20 |
| Recency | 15 |
| Geo confidence | 10 |
| Operational relevance | 5 |
Signal scores are not predictions. Watchdesk impact scores add proximity, configured radius, watch item priority, and source confidence to decide what deserves operator attention now.
Decision path
- Pull and normalize each upstream feed inside its own adapter and record source-run health.
- Deduplicate and score stored events before operator-facing filtering and watch-item matching.
- Route only deterministic alerts into queue transitions and delivery scheduling.
- Use AI only after the stored event set exists, and reject any drafted output that cannot bind claims back to source labels.
Source freshness gates
- Fresh: Last success is within 2x the expected interval.
- Delayed: Last success is between 2x and 6x the expected interval.
- Stale: Last success exceeded 6x the expected interval.
- Down: Multiple consecutive failures have taken the source offline.
- Disabled: Manual kill switch disabled this source.
Operating boundaries
- Alert matching, delivery, and queue transitions remain deterministic. AI-assisted briefs can be enabled for sourced summarization, but alerts never depend on an LLM response.
- Frontlines provides source-backed operational awareness and does not replace emergency services, government advisories, professional security judgment, or official travel guidance.
- Every AI-generated brief claim must bind to stored source references. If AI is unavailable or fails guardrails, the product falls back to deterministic templates.
- Programmatic country and topic pages remain non-indexable until they have enough real coverage and unique analysis to stand on their own.
Methodology FAQ
No. Alert matching, delivery, and queue transitions remain deterministic. AI only augments sourced summaries and falls back to deterministic templates when unavailable.
Frontlines prioritizes official government, UN, and institutional sources ahead of multi-source discovery feeds, and excludes noisy unofficial channels from the MVP.