# Introduction

The **Federal Register Watcher** uses artificial intelligence to help you follow and search for
[Federal Register](/background/federal-register) documents of interest. Over 400 federal agencies
publish in the Federal Register, and on an average workday it gets 100+ new documents containing
400+ pages. The documents are public, but monitoring and searching them is challenging,
time-consuming and expensive. Our AI-powered tools make it easier to discover, understand and track
relevant regulatory activity.

The Federal Register Watcher is built and maintained by
[Numantic Solutions](https://numanticsolutions.com). [Open the app](https://nli-frw.numanticsolutions.com)
to get started.

## How AI and data science power the Watcher

1. **Content Keyword Generation:** AI analyzes each document's full text to generate descriptive keywords,
   making searches more effective and comprehensive.
2. **Category Keyword Classification:** Documents are automatically assigned to mutually-exclusive thematic
   categories (e.g., "Environmental Policy", "Securities Regulations"), making it easier to group and explore
   similar documents.
3. **Summary Posts:** Each document is condensed into a concise summary, so you can quickly
   understand its content without reading the full text.
4. **Document Summary Blogs:** AI generates detailed blog posts highlighting key aspects of
   individual documents for deeper understanding.
5. **Themed Blog Synthesis:** Multiple related documents are analyzed together to create themed blog
   posts, making it easier to understand collections of related Federal Register entries and
   regulatory trends.
6. **Enriched Metadata:** Multiple data sources and data curation processes add attributes to each
   document, including:
   - Federal Register sections
   - Document abstracts and topics (if available)
   - Suggested Federal Register searches that return the document
   - Document page view and comment counts
   - Regulations.gov docket, comment period and comment details
   - Citations and their locations in the document, covering these legal and regulatory sources:
     - **CFR:** Code of Federal Regulations
     - **U.S.C.:** United States Code
     - **FR:** Federal Register
     - **Pub. L.:** Public Laws
     - **Stat.:** Statutes at Large
     - **E.O.:** Executive Orders
     - **Rules:** Systematic identifier formats

   See [Understanding Legal Citations](/background/legal-citations) for what these are, and the
   [Data Dictionary](/data-dictionary) for every field.

## Where to go next

- [Tools](/tools/activity): what each tool in the app does.
- [Tips & Notes](/tips): defaults and behavior that apply across the tools.
- [Data Dictionary](/data-dictionary): the meaning of every field.
- [Developer Portal](https://developers.federalregisterwatcher.ai): API and MCP access to the same
  data, for developers.