How this directory is built

Three public sources. The New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs licence registries, the New Jersey ABC liquor licence file, and the Overture Maps Foundation open place data, pinned to a specific release so every record can be traced back to the version it came from.

Nothing here is copied from Google or Yelp. Not the hours, not the phone numbers, not the categories, not the photos, not the ratings. That is a standing rule, not a phase. OpenStreetMap is used to find businesses worth checking, never to publish a fact verbatim.

Every listing page names its own sources at the bottom, field by field, with the licence notice the source terms require.

A record has to clear a liveness check. That means a current state licence, a website that answers, or a working phone number. Records that fail sit in a queue instead of going live. A directory salted with dead businesses is worse than a short one.

Most listings rest on a single source. Where two or three sources cover the same business they get reconciled, and the sources for each listing are printed at the bottom of its page so you can see how thin or thick the evidence is.

Obvious duplicates get merged rather than listed twice, and low-confidence merges go to a human before they happen. Some duplicates still slip through — a business filed under two slightly different names, or one address in two records. If you spot one, tell me and I'll collapse it.

Hours. Not some hours — no hours at all, for any listing. The open sources don't carry them reliably and the closed ones aren't ours to copy. So every listing says so out loud, and adding your hours is the single best reason to claim a listing.

Descriptions are missing too. So are the businesses that exist only as a Facebook page, which in this county is a lot of them. 216 listings have no street address on file yet, and 111 of those have no town either. 281 have no phone number.

None of that gets rounded up or hidden behind a filter. If the county has a business this directory doesn't, the honest answer is that the list is still short, and it gets longer every week.

Owners can claim a listing and edit it. Anyone can flag a closure or a wrong number, no account needed, and it comes straight to me. Every listing carries the date it was last checked, so you can judge for yourself how much to trust it.

Nobody pays for placement. Order is alphabetical inside every group. If that ever changes, the paid part will be labelled and kept outside the list, not sprinkled through it.

Steve, who lives in Clinton and writes The Hunterdon Scoop, the county's free Thursday-morning newsletter. Corrections go to corrections@hunterdonscoop.com and get read by a person.