Index · version 1.0
Record Completeness Index
The share of 8 core fields populated across a municipality's development permit records, averaged. It measures what a dataset supports, not how a municipality performs.
Standings
| Municipality | RCI | Application date | Decision date | Status | Description | Address | Coordinates | Land use district | Application category | Filings behind it |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Calgary | 95.8 | 100% | 86.3% | 100% | 99.9% | 100% | 99.6% | 100% | 80.5% | 41,965 |
| Edmonton | 83.7 | 73.7% | 0% | 100% | 98.2% | 99.9% | 100% | 99.9% | 97.8% | 25,803 |
| Ottawa | 75.0 | 100% | 0% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 100% | 0% | 100% | 695 |
Method
Question. Which questions can each city's published development record actually answer?
Calculation. For each of 8 fields — application date, decision date, status, description, address, coordinates, land use district, application category — compute the percentage of the municipality's development permit records where the field is published and non-empty. The index is the unweighted mean of those percentages. Every field counts equally, because weighting them would embed a view about which questions matter most.
Who qualifies. Every municipality with development permit records in the corpus.
What this number does not say
- This is not a rating of any municipality. It measures a published dataset, not a city's performance, and a municipality may hold a field internally without publishing it.
- This is not a rating of any development. No index here scores, ranks or grades an individual application, project, site or firm — they operate on aggregates only.
- This measures a published dataset, not a municipality. A city may hold a field internally and not publish it in open data, and that is invisible here.
- It is not a transparency ranking or a service assessment. It says which analyses each dataset makes possible.
- Fields are weighted equally by design. A different weighting would produce a different order, so the order is not the finding — the field-by-field detail is.
- Only the development permit layer is scored, because it is the one layer every live source publishes.
Citing this index
Record Completeness Index (RCI) v1.0, DevelopmentApplications.ca, Calgary 95.8. Computed from municipal open data.
Cite the municipality as the source of the underlying records and this platform as the source of the index. The two are different claims and should not be merged.
Questions about the Record Completeness Index
Answered from the index definition and its current standings.
- What is the Record Completeness Index?
- The Record Completeness Index (RCI) is a measure published by DevelopmentApplications.ca, currently at method version 1.0. The share of 8 core fields populated across a municipality's development permit records, averaged. It measures what a dataset supports, not how a municipality performs. It is this platform's own construction computed from fields municipalities publish — no municipality publishes, reviews or endorses it.
- What are the current RCI standings?
- Measured in percent of core fields populated: Calgary 95.8, Edmonton 83.7, Ottawa 75.0. The ranking describes the published records, not the municipalities themselves.
- How is the RCI calculated?
- For each of 8 fields — application date, decision date, status, description, address, coordinates, land use district, application category — compute the percentage of the municipality's development permit records where the field is published and non-empty. The index is the unweighted mean of those percentages. Every field counts equally, because weighting them would embed a view about which questions matter most. Every municipality with development permit records in the corpus.