Policy · Reference

Public Data and Sourcing Policy

Last reviewed · 2026-08-03

Bearings Network is a verified registry of organizations working on defense and national-security missions. Its public organization records are built from authoritative public sources and, where an organization claims and verifies its record, from information the organization itself provides. This page describes what is collected, why it is published, how the origin of every field is retained, and how any organization can request a correction.

What we publish

A public Organization Record on Bearings Network contains fields drawn from a fixed set of public sources plus organization-provided fields that the organization has chosen to publish. Every field is one of three kinds:

Public-source facts. Identity, registration status, addresses, socio-economic certifications, contract awards, patents, SBIR/STTR awards, and research grants drawn from the US federal government or other public registries. These carry the source identifier and the date we fetched the value.
Derived facts. NAICS-based mission classification, ecosystem categorization, and connectivity across missions, programs, and technologies. Derivations are shown with the input fields that produced them.
Organization-provided information. Capability descriptions, facility inventories, evidence links, offerings, mission alignment, and contact functions authored by a verified representative of the organization. These appear only after the organization has claimed and published its record, and only under the visibility level the organization sets per field.

Where the data comes from

The public-source layer of a record is assembled from these authoritative registries. All are US federal or explicitly public feeds. No commercial data brokers, scraping of private websites, or purchased mailing lists are used.

SAM.gov · legal name, UEI, CAGE code, registration status, physical + mailing addresses, NAICS codes, SBA socio-economic certifications, POC email hash (for verification only, never displayed).
USAspending.gov · federal contract award totals, top awarding agencies, top NAICS categories.
USPTO Open Data Portal · issued patents assigned to the organization.
SBIR.gov · SBIR/STTR topic awards (as available; SBIR public API access is intermittent).
Federal research grant feeds · CFDA-filtered grant awards (NIH, NSF, DOE, and others).
The organization's own website · only after the organization claims its record and only for fields the organization's claimant chooses to import. Suggested imports pass through a review queue before they publish.

Why we publish it

The defense and national-security industrial base is difficult to see from the outside. Public information about who works on what is scattered across dozens of federal registries, published in many formats, and often out of date. Bearings Network exists to give a single canonical, verifiable public view of that ecosystem — organized around missions and programs — so that legitimate participants can find each other, and so the public record itself is easier to hold accurate.

Every fact we publish is either already publicly available elsewhere or has been affirmatively provided and published by the organization itself.

Provenance is preserved on every field

Every field on a public Organization Record carries the source of its current value and the date the value was last confirmed. When a value changes, the previous value and its source are retained in the field's history. This is not cosmetic — provenance is what allows the record to be challenged and corrected credibly.

What we do not publish

No CUI. Bearings Network handles no Controlled Unclassified Information. Uploads or pastes of CUI are refused at the input layer.
No classified information of any kind.
No employee directories. We do not scrape, import, or maintain lists of employees. Contact functions are role-based and organization-authorized.
No purchased data. No commercial data brokers, no purchased marketing lists, no scraped public databases for personal identifiers.
No behavioral ad tracking. No third-party analytics or ad pixels ship in the public pages.

How to correct or dispute a fact

Any organization or member of the public may request a correction to any published fact. The full workflow is described in the Correction and Dispute Policy. In summary:

Public-source facts are corrected by updating the underlying source (SAM.gov, USPTO, etc.), then requesting re-ingestion. Bearings Network does not override authoritative sources; we mirror them.
Derived facts can be disputed directly on the record. Reviewed disputes result in a re-derivation, a manual override with recorded justification, or an in-line note that a dispute is open.
Organization-provided facts can be edited by the organization itself via the verified claim. Public disputes route to the organization's Review Queue.
Ownership disputes (a claim by the wrong party) route through the admin review queue and can reverse a claim.

Who to contact

For correction requests, disputes, or questions about a specific fact: hello@bearings.network. Include the organization's slug or UEI and the specific field.

Removal from Bearings Network

An organization can request that its public record be archived. Archival hides the record from public directory views and search but preserves the underlying public-source provenance for audit. Complete deletion of an unclaimed public record is not offered because the record is a mirror of information already public elsewhere; the correct remedy is to correct that public source.

An organization's own account and organization-provided data can be deleted per the account closure workflow.

Changes to this policy

Changes are dated in the "Last reviewed" line at the top of this page. Material changes are announced to claimants via the in-app notification matrix.