The Government Data Freshness Challenge: How We Keep 200+ Sources in Sync
Government agencies publish data on their own schedule — some real-time, some weekly, some whenever they feel like it. Here's how ComplianceGrid maintains data freshness across 200+ sources.
The Problem
There is no standard for how US government agencies publish data. Some provide real-time REST APIs. Some publish CSV files on FTP servers. Some update a website and expect you to scrape it. Some mail you a CD-ROM (seriously, the ATF still does this for certain FFL data).
When you're building a compliance platform that aggregates 200+ government data sources, you're not building one integration — you're building 200 bespoke data pipelines, each with its own update frequency, format, authentication method, and failure mode.
Our Data Pipeline Architecture
We categorize every data source into one of four ingestion patterns:
1. Real-Time API Proxy
For sources with reliable REST APIs (SEC EDGAR, FDIC, FDA openFDA, FCC ULS), we proxy requests in real-time. Your API call hits our gateway, we call the upstream source, normalize the response, cache it, and return it. Freshness: real-time.
2. Polling with Diff Detection
For sources that publish bulk files on a schedule (OFAC SDN, BIS Entity List, trade.gov CSL), we poll at regular intervals, compute diffs against the previous version, and update our normalized store. Freshness: 6 hours for critical lists, daily for others.
3. Scheduled Bulk Sync
For sources that publish infrequently or require batch download (ATF FFL records, FAA aircraft registry), we run full syncs on a schedule. Freshness: daily to weekly.
4. Event-Driven Ingest
For sources that publish change notifications (some SEC filing types, FDA recall alerts), we subscribe to event feeds and process updates as they arrive. Freshness: minutes.
Monitoring Freshness
Every data source has a lastSyncedAt timestamp and an expected maxStalenessMinutes threshold. If a source exceeds its staleness threshold, we:
- Alert our ops team immediately
- Mark the source as stale in API responses (via a
dataFreshnessfield) - Serve cached data rather than returning errors
- Log the incident for our status page
You can check data freshness for any endpoint by examining the X-Data-Freshness response header, which returns the age of the data in seconds.
Why This Matters
If you're screening a transaction against the OFAC SDN list and the list is 3 days stale, you might clear a party that was designated yesterday. That's not a bug — that's a compliance failure. Data freshness is a compliance requirement, not a performance metric.