Amtsgraph

The open, validated graph of German public authorities — who is competent, where, and for what.

Built 2026-06-11 from official registers (Orts- und Gerichtsverzeichnis, PVOG/FITKO, Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Destatis, BayernPortal, OpenPLZ, xRepository). Every build passes a validation gate (coverage, collision, contiguity, benchmark checks) before release; every record carries provenance (source, URL, fetch timestamp).

Files

File	Rows	Content
authorities.jsonl	19,745	all authorities with contacts, provenance, external IDs
court_chains.jsonl	338,873	instance chains per (plz, ortk, matter)
competences.jsonl	79,630	kind × area assignments (rank 0 = apply here)
edges.jsonl	8,395	parent / supervision / appeal / successor relations
places_courts.jsonl	14,057	official court-resolution place register
municipalities.jsonl	10,950	AGS/ARS spine with postal codes (M:N)
matters.jsonl	36	legal-matter taxonomy (14 core + special)
caveats.jsonl	5,369	warnings that must be surfaced with answers

Resolution logic

1. Courts: look up places_courts by postal code (+ locality when one code spans several court districts), then court_chains by (plz, ortk, matter) — rows ordered by position are the full instance chain (role court) plus prosecution offices (role prosecution). Join authorities for contacts and filing addresses.
2. Agencies: map the user's municipality to its ags via municipalities, then filter competences by kind and area (gemeinde = 8-digit AGS, kreis = 5-digit prefix, land = 2-digit). rank 0 = the office to apply at; rank 1 = supervisory body.
3. Always join caveats for the scope you resolved — they flag genuine ambiguities and register gaps. For legal use, an honest warning beats a confident wrong answer.
4. The organisational web (Bavaria): traverse edges with relation='parent' for department hierarchies, 'supervision' for oversight, 'appeal' for derived court appeal routes.

Null semantics

Empty fields are deliberate, not dirty data:

• legal_form is only defined for Jobcenter (gE = joint federal-municipal institution, zkT = municipal provider); for every other kind it is null.
• For courts, the full visiting address (street + postal code + city) lives in street as published by the justice register, and the separate postal-box address in postal_address; the plz/city columns are filled where sources provide them as discrete fields (agencies), null otherwise.
• valid_to is null for active records; a timestamp marks retired ones (kept for traceability — e.g. offices replaced by a more precise department).
• matter on edges is null for non-court relations (parent, supervision).
• external_ids may be empty for organisational units that have no official register identity of their own.

Important notes

• General information, not legal advice; statutory exceptions to competence rules exist that no dataset can capture.
• Department-level depth covers Bavaria's 96 Kreisverwaltungsbehörden (pilot); other Länder resolve at authority level.
• Underlying records originate from official public registers; their respective terms govern redistribution (see the source registry in the GitHub repository). Dual-licensed by audience: non-commercial / human-rights / research use under Apache-2.0 (code) + CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (data); commercial, corporate and governmental use under the SNTIQ-CM License v1.0 (free written permission, non-harm covenant, attribution, reciprocity) — see LICENSING.md in the GitHub repository.

Citation

@misc{amtsgraph2026,
  title   = {Amtsgraph: an open validated graph of German public
             authorities, court competences and organisational structure},
  author  = {Glushkov, David and {SNTIQ}},
  year    = {2026},
  url     = {https://github.com/SNTIQ-Team/amtsgraph}
}

Source code, pipeline and full documentation: https://github.com/SNTIQ-Team/amtsgraph