How the Africa Internet Compass is built
The Africa Internet Compass catalogues organisations, networks, internet exchanges, data centres, submarine cables, top-level domains, and the relationships between them, across the African continent. This page summarises how we build it.
Sources
Compass draws from authoritative public registries (regional internet registries, country-code registries, accredited registrar lists), from the operators themselves where they publish current information, and from a measurement programme that confirms reachability and topology where claims need verification.
We follow the source-priority discipline of preferring authoritative registries over secondary sources, secondary sources over editorial inference. We do not bulk-ingest data that is licensed for restricted use; we cite individual records to their source instead.
Verification
Every entity we publish has cleared a verification step. Network, organisation, registrar, data centre, cable and top-level domain records need at least two independent sources before a public profile is created; internet exchanges need three. Records with fewer sources sit in a holding state until a corroborating source is found.
Confidence decays when a record has not been re-verified for 180 days, which takes it out of search and the sitemap until it is. Entity pages show the date a record was last verified, where one exists, so readers can judge how current it is.
Confidence
Each entity carries a confidence score, computed from how many independent sources corroborate it, how recent those sources are, and whether any conflicts exist between them. High-confidence entities pass our publish gate and appear in search and sitemap. Lower-confidence entities exist in our catalogue but are not indexed.
Publish gate
Three rules govern whether an entity has a public, indexable profile: the structured fields needed to describe it are populated; it meets the source requirement for its type; and its confidence score has cleared the threshold for its type. Entities that miss any of these are held, and graduate automatically once the missing data arrives.
Corrections
We welcome corrections, additions, and disputes from operators and readers. Use the "Suggest a correction" link on any Compass entity page, or our contact form. We acknowledge within 48 hours and act within ten business days for routine corrections. See our editorial standards for the full corrections and disputes policy.
Licence
Compass data is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. You are free to reuse, redistribute, and build upon Atlas data with attribution to tech.africa.