Why Lumea
Provenance is the product
Lumea runs on a single interpretive engine - the Geltungskette - that binds every signal to its document, its issuing office, its parcel, a timestamp, and a calibrated confidence number. Generalist scrapers and LLM-only systems produce plausible answers without traceable evidence. In court, in a board meeting, or in a regulator's letter, plausible isn't enough.
Anatomy of a Lumea signal
Type
planning, infrastructure, environmental...
Document
Amtsblatt der Stadt Köln, 46. Jahrgang G266...
Issuing office
Köln
Parcel
Mülheim Flur 003, Flurstück 2785
Coordinates
50.96646°N · 7.00859°E
Discovered
02 Dec 2020 · 14:07 CET
Confidence
0.9 - Source-verified
The mechanism
Why this is hard. Why the law does not help.
German municipalities publish planning decisions in the Amtsblatt. Under the Baugesetzbuch, that publication is the legally sufficient notification. The owner is treated as if they had read it.
The OVG Rheinland-Pfalz confirmed it twice over (10.06.2009 - 8 C 11319/08): municipalities are not obliged to notify owners individually, and it is not unreasonable to expect the owner to monitor the Amtsblatt themselves.
Translation: the law places the duty of vigilance on you - and gives you no scalable way to discharge it. For a single property, manageable. Across an institutional portfolio spanning hundreds of municipalities, structurally impossible without automation.
OVG Rheinland-Pfalz, Urteil vom 10.06.2009 - Az. 8 C 11319/08
The engine
Five links. No skipped steps.
Every signal Lumea surfaces passes through the same five-step provenance chain we call the Geltungskette. Skip any link and the signal is rejected - or quarantined for analyst review. Nothing reaches a buyer's inbox without the full chain attached. The chain is the moat: the hard part is not running a model on a PDF; it is the index across all 11,054 German publication systems, the parcel-binding logic, the office-authority graph, and the criticality scoring that separates noise from signal.
Geltungskette · v1.05 of 5 verified
01 · Source
Document
A PDF or notice published on a public municipal portal. Hashed on download for tamper-evidence.
02 · Authority
Office
The Amt that issued it - Amt 60 (Bauleitplanung), Amt 61, Stadtrat. Authority makes the document legally binding.
03 · Spatial
Parcel
Bound to ALKIS Flurstück IDs - not approximate coordinates. The signal touches a specific piece of land.
04 · Temporal
Timestamp
Discovered-at and effective-from. CET. Append-only. We can prove when we saw what.
05 · Critical
Criticality
Each signal is scored against the bound parcel - regulatory shift, value delta, deadline urgency. Below the criticality threshold, it logs but does not alert. You see what moves the needle.
SHA-256 hashBehördenkennungALKIS-SchlüsselISO-8601, CETScored 0–1
The law, in plain language
We do not process data we are not entitled to process.
Two legal anchors decide whether what we do is allowed - and whether the duty we close was, in fact, the owner's.
§5 UrhG removes copyright protection from official notices and statutes. Amtsblätter, B-Pläne, F-Pläne, and the cadastral record are frei nutzbar. Lumea ingests only what the public-source law explicitly permits - and our coverage is bounded by that law.
OVG Rheinland-Pfalz, 10.06.2009 - 8 C 11319/08 confirms the inverse: the duty to monitor is on the owner. The court already said so.
§5 UrhG · OVG Rheinland-Pfalz, Urteil vom 10.06.2009 - Az. 8 C 11319/08
Why this matters
A signal without provenance is just a rumour.
Generalist scrapers and LLM-only systems produce plausible answers without traceable evidence. In court, in a board meeting, or in a regulator's letter, plausible isn't enough.
The Geltungskette turns extracted text into citable evidence. Every Lumea signal is one click away from the original PDF, the issuing office's stamp, and the parcel boundary it touches. If a claim turns out to be wrong, the chain tells you exactly where it broke - and we publish the correction the same day.
This is also our IP moat. The hard work isn't running a model on a PDF. The hard work is the index across all 11,054 German publication systems, the parcel-binding logic, the office-authority graph, and the criticality scoring that separates a procedural Bekanntmachung from the one signal a Leiter Asset Management actually needs to read this morning.
“If we say it, we can prove it. If it matters, you will know.”Our Promise
Audit a parcel with us.
Send a Flurstück you already understand - a recent zoning change, a contested Satzung, a development you closed. We will walk the Geltungskette link by link - and you tell us where it breaks.
30 minutes · DE/EN · NDA on request