Sources · Business websites
Each business's own website
The only tier of data on West Loop Vibe that involves human writing. Short descriptions, taglines, founding years, menu links, and reservation links come from each business's own public website — paraphrased into a neutral voice, with the source URL and verification date recorded on the record.
The writing rule
The rule is strict and load-bearing: editorial text can only restate what the business's own site already says. If a restaurant calls itself "a neighborhood Italian café," that phrasing can be paraphrased into a description. If the website is silent on a fact — opening date, who the chef is, where ingredients come from — that fact does not appear.
No opinions. No ratings. No comparisons. The description's job is to answer "what is this place?" in one or two sentences a visitor can act on, in plain prose. Reviews and rankings are explicitly out of scope — see methodology for what the site won't do.
What's covered
0 of 1,937 business enrichment overlays currently include at least one website-sourced field. Coverage is highest for consumer-facing places (restaurants, bars, cafes, retail) and lower for office tenants and one-off services. Where a business has no website or its site doesn't say enough to paraphrase, the listing carries only the City record's basic fields.
Verification cadence
Each enrichment carries its own verified_at date. A
re-verification queue surfaces anything older than six months for a
fresh check — a manual pass through the cited URL to confirm the fact
is still on the business's website. Items that fail re-verification
are dropped from the listing.
Why this is the third tier
Sources are arranged in tiers, with later tiers only filling gaps — never overriding — what earlier tiers already say. Business-website paraphrase sits below the Chicago Data Portal (the legal authority for who is licensed and where) and OpenStreetMap (the open source-of-truth for phone, website, and hours). The third tier enriches what the first two already established.