The public record is not public
Most of the public record is public in name only.
You can download the filing, but you cannot query it. You can read the notice, if you know which of nine hundred registries published it. The opening hours are right there on the door, which is to say they exist nowhere at all. The information is technically available and practically out of reach, and we have learned to treat that as normal.
It is worth saying plainly: access is not usability. A record you can read with unlimited patience is not the same as a record you can use. For a person, the difference is an afternoon of tedium. For software, the difference is everything, because software has no patience and no judgment. It needs the fact in a fixed shape, with a date on it, or it effectively does not have the fact.
Public should mean usable by anyone, not merely readable by anyone with unlimited time.
The gap matters more every year. More of what people rely on is decided by software: what to show, what to flag, where to route, when to act. When the underlying record is unreadable to machines, the software falls back on stale copies and guesswork, and everyone downstream inherits the error.
Closing that gap is slow, unglamorous work. Reading sources continuously. Resolving the same fact told a hundred ways. Agreeing on a shape and keeping it current. It is not the kind of work that announces itself, which may be why so little of it gets done.
We started Relative to do that work. To take the record the world already publishes and make it actually public: consistent, current, and ready to query, for people and for machines.