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Wayfinder: Clear paths to public services
Public-service websites often reflect an institution's structure rather than the task a citizen needs to complete. People search through menus, while small web teams manually collect requirements, maintain links and check changes. Wayfinder connects those two problems. Citizens use a browser extension on the official website, search in everyday language, read sourced requirements and follow highlighted links to the next step. They can ask Bob for guidance when search is insufficient. The citizen completes the actual procedure on the official service. Wayfinder does not submit forms or request credentials. For the site team, IBM Bob organizes extracted page evidence into a catalog through bounded parallel tasks. A second Bob pass reviews selected records against their sources. The motor measures link paths, compares successive catalog readings and exports an accessible A-Z index plus structured GovernmentService data. Custom Bob IDE modes, skills and an MCP server provide a development workflow for catalog maintenance. The prototype includes municipal examples in Argentina and catalogs from other public websites. Coverage is explicit and bounded: login-only or JavaScript-heavy content can remain missing. Model review is a second automated check, not human certification. In a controlled 16-procedure fixture with simulated Bob, the first procedures appeared at 3.4 seconds, versus 10.4 seconds for the complete reviewed catalog. On 92 synthetic Spanish validation queries, instant search reached 69.6% top-1, compared with 66.3% for BM25. These are development benchmarks, not measured population-wide outcomes or a human labor-saving study. We also prepared 3,750 public procedure records and ran bilingual IBM Granite retrieval experiments. Granite remains separate from production because improvements were inconsistent across language directions. The live assistant uses Bob, while instant search runs without a model call. The deliverable combines an operational citizen interface with reproducible evidence and concrete maintenance outputs for the team responsible for the site.
27 Sep 2026
