How it works
How water restriction data is gathered, and when it is read from a page rather than taken from a published value.
Water restrictions are set by regional councils, district councils, and water authorities. The site reads the publicly available information they publish. Where that information is machine-readable, it is taken as it stands. That covers the level in force for each area, the changes already scheduled, flow readings from monitoring sites, and the rules for each water management area.
Where a restriction is published as a web page, the site reads the page itself. That path runs in three steps.
Sources are checked regularly
Each source is checked on its own schedule, so a change usually appears soon after it is posted.
Changes are read from the page
The content is analysed to work out what changed:
- An area moving between restriction stages, such as Level 1 to Level 2
- An upcoming change taking effect on a set date
- A restriction being lifted or expiring
Each result carries a confidence score and the reasoning behind it, so an applied change can be audited.
Changes are applied, or held for review
High-confidence changes are applied automatically. Lower-confidence changes wait for a person to accept or discard them.
Auto-detection
Where a change was read off a page, the value carries a line reading "Detected by AI". The line links back to this page. It appears on the current restriction and on any upcoming change, wherever the value came from a page.
An AI reads the page and reports the restriction it states; whether that differs from what the site already holds is judged separately. High-confidence changes are applied without a person looking at them, so a value marked "Detected by AI" may not have been checked by a person. Every detection keeps the page it came from and the passage it was read from, so a value can be traced back to its source.