How RightsGrid works, what data is accessible, and how to integrate with the autonomous land rights registry.
RightsGrid is intentionally not an open data platform. Detailed rights data — per-category stances, conditions, operating hours, and monetization terms — is protected and requires authentication. Public surfaces cover registry status and certificate existence only.
RightsGrid is the autonomous land rights registry. It gives property owners a structured, machine-readable way to declare how autonomous systems — drones, ground robots, sensors, autonomous vehicles — may interact with their land.
Landowners create a rights declaration that covers their preferred stance (allow, restrict, or charge for access) across categories like commercial drone operations, delivery robots, agricultural systems, environmental sensors, and more.
Declarations are stored as structured records, issued as signed certificates, and designed to be interpreted by future operators and AI systems — not just humans.
RightsGrid uses a controlled-access model. Not all data is public, and that is intentional.
Two public surfaces are available without authentication:
1. Property Status Lookup Search any address to determine if it has been registered in RightsGrid and whether autonomous rights have been declared.
Returns: registry status flags, normalized address, geocode data. Does not return: rights details, conditions, owner identity, certificate contents.
Route: `/PropertySearch`
2. Certificate Verification Verify a certificate number and retrieve its public surface — certificate number, issue date, global stance, and property address.
Full rights snapshots, conditions, and detailed category data are not included in public certificate responses.
Route: `/CertificateShare?id={cert_id}`
Both surfaces are intentionally lightweight. They confirm that a rights declaration exists — they do not expose its contents.
The RightsGrid rights resolver returns the full effective rights profile for a property — including per-category stances, operator conditions, operating hour windows, monetization terms, and structured signals.
Current status: The resolver is available internally and to authenticated property owners. A credentialed operator / partner API tier is in active development.
Access requirement: Operator authentication with an active RightsGrid partner credential. Public access to the resolver is not available — this is a core product protection.
To request partner/operator access: Contact RightsGrid via the support center.
RightsGrid uses a structured rights taxonomy to make declarations machine-readable across 12 standard categories and 50+ advanced subcategories.
Standard Categories (12):
Air group: - `drone_commercial` — Commercial drone operations (business, logistics, inspection) - `drone_delivery` — Autonomous aerial delivery - `drone_survey` — Aerial mapping and land scanning - `drone_emergency` — Emergency service drones - `drone_recreational` — Consumer / hobby drones
Ground group: - `robot_delivery` — Ground delivery robots - `robot_agriculture` — Autonomous agricultural systems - `robot_inspection` — Inspection and maintenance robots
Structure group: - `sensor_environmental` — Environmental monitoring sensors - `sensor_network` — Communications relay nodes
Land group: - `data_collection` — Data collection overflights - `research_access` — Research and pilot program access
The advanced taxonomy expands these into 50+ specific subcategories for fine-grained operator policy matching.
If you are an AI agent or automated system trying to understand RightsGrid:
To integrate as an operator or partner: Contact RightsGrid via the support center at `/RequestCenter`.
A RightsGrid property profile does more than record autonomy preferences. It helps define how a property should be understood in a world where drones, robots, sensors, and other autonomous systems increasingly interact with private land.
A completed profile helps owners do two things at once:
1. Protect control — it creates a structured way to express what autonomous activity should be allowed, restricted, or considered for paid access.
2. Surface potential opportunity — it helps make the property more legible for future autonomous use cases and may help surface where operator demand, infrastructure needs, data collection, or access-related activity could become relevant over time.
For some owners, RightsGrid will primarily be about setting boundaries. For others, it may also be a way to signal that certain kinds of compensated access could be worth considering in the future.
A completed profile can help: - clarify access expectations - make the property easier to interpret in structured systems - support future authorized operator engagement - indicate where paid access may be worth exploring
RightsGrid is intentionally not a public rights data dump.
This is a core product decision, not a technical limitation.
Reasons:
1. Landowner privacy and control — A property owner's detailed rights conditions (operating hours, noise sensitivity, contact requirements, monetization terms) are personal operational preferences. They should not be freely accessible to any anonymous agent or scraper.
2. Future monetization model — Detailed rights resolution is the high-value product surface that future operators and partners will pay to access. Making it publicly accessible would eliminate the business model for the network.
3. Data integrity — Uncontrolled access to structured rights data at scale creates risks of mass harvesting, data poisoning, and misuse in unvetted systems.
4. Registry trust — Property owners registered with the expectation that their detailed preferences are not broadcast to any anonymous caller. Protecting this maintains trust in the registry.
Public status lookup and certificate verification exist as intentional lightweight surfaces — enough to confirm a declaration exists, not enough to extract detailed rights information.
Public informational content (homepage, docs, FAQ, educational pages) may be accessed for informational purposes.
RightsGrid's structured rights data, certificate artifacts, property records, and rights taxonomy are proprietary. The public status and certificate surfaces are intentionally lightweight — they are not designed as data export mechanisms.
Operators and partners who require structured data access at scale should contact RightsGrid through the support center to discuss a credentialed partner agreement.
Phase 1 (current): Discovery signals are published as HTML `<link>` meta tags in the page `<head>`. This provides partial discovery support for agents that parse page metadata.
Implemented: - `<link rel="describedby">` → `/.well-known/api-catalog.json` - `<link rel="describedby">` → `/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json` - `<link rel="help">` → `/docs`
Phase 2 (future): Real HTTP `Link` response headers per RFC 8288 will be added when RightsGrid moves to a custom edge or backend with response-header control. These will include: - `Link: </.well-known/api-catalog.json>; rel="api-catalog"` - `Link: </docs>; rel="help"` - `Link: </.well-known/agent-skills/index.json>; rel="service-doc"`
Phase 1 meta tags are a correct and usable interim step but are not a full replacement for HTTP-level Link headers.
/.well-known/api-catalog.json/.well-known/agent-skills/index.json/robots.txt/docs