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Categories are regulatory topics that organize data points into logical groupings. Every data point type in Fordje belongs to one or more categories — Permitting, Inspections, Building Standards, Zoning & Land Use, and others. They give you a way to scope your queries to the topic you care about, so you are not sifting through thousands of unrelated requirements. When you are building an integration around permitting workflows, you do not need zoning data in your response. Categories let you express that intent directly in the API call.

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Available categories

Each category contains data point types that relate to that regulatory topic. Here are some examples:
This list is not exhaustive. Use the GET /v1/categories endpoint to retrieve the full, up-to-date list of categories programmatically.
Note that some data point types appear in more than one category. Fire sprinkler requirements, for example, are relevant to both Building Standards and Inspections.

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How categories help you

Categories solve a practical problem: the Fordje platform tracks a large number of data point types across many regulatory topics. If you query data points for an AHJ without any filtering, you get everything — permitting, inspections, building standards, zoning, licensing, and more. For most integrations, that is far more data than you need. By passing category_ids when you query data points, you tell the API to return only the data points that belong to those topics. This keeps your responses smaller, your parsing simpler, and your application focused on the requirements that actually matter for the work at hand.
If you know the exact questions you need, filter by data_point_type_ids instead. Categories are best when you want everything within a topic without having to enumerate individual types.

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Listing categories

To see all available categories, call the categories endpoint:
Each category has an id and a name. Use the id when filtering data points or defining collections.

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Filtering data points by category

Pass one or more category IDs to the data points endpoint to narrow your results to a specific topic. For example, to get permitting data points for a specific AHJ:
You can combine category_ids with other filters like state_codes or data_point_type_ids to further narrow results. For example, category_ids=53,63 returns data points from both the Permitting and Inspections categories.

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Categories in collections

When you create a collection in the Fordje platform, you can include category IDs as part of its definition. The collection then acts as a reusable filter that automatically scopes data pulls to the topics you specified. This is useful when your team repeatedly needs the same set of categories across different projects. Instead of passing category_ids in every API call, you define the categories once in a collection and execute it against whatever AHJs you need.
Collections can combine category IDs with specific data point type IDs for even more precise filtering. See the collections concept page for the full workflow.

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Next steps

List categories

Full API reference for GET /v1/categories — query parameters and pagination.

Data points

Learn more about the data points that categories organize, including types, values, and filtering.