GewerbeLotse — Which trade matches my plan?

A free, publicly available web tool for Austria: users describe in everyday language what they want to do professionally — GewerbeLotse returns the matching official GISA trade wordings, including trade key, free vs regulated classification and typical orientation hints.

🌐 Live at: gewerbelotse.at

Starting situation

In Austria, trade registration is tied to official wordings. Someone who says “I want to take wedding photos” rarely knows the exact GISA wording, the trade key or whether the activity is free or regulated. Official lists are extensive and written in administrative language — hard to navigate for founders, freelancers and advisors.

Solution

GewerbeLotse translates everyday language into the language of Austrian trade law — clearly labelled as orientation, not legal advice and not an official authority decision.

How it works

1. Natural-language input

Examples: “nail studio”, “build websites”, “sell döner”. No forms in bureaucratic language required.

2. Search & classification

Lexical, semantic and AI-supported matches find suitable wordings — even when the user’s phrasing differs from the official text.

3. Clear results

Official wording, trade key, type (free / regulated / partial trade) and typical pitfalls at a glance.

4. Next steps

Further orientation on qualifications, authority finders and registration — always with the disclaimer: not legal advice.

What the tool delivers

Orientation instead of bureaucratic language

• Everyday language → official GISA wordings
• Trade key and classification free / regulated / partial trade
• Typical pitfalls and orientation hints

Privacy by design

• No personal data
• No client storage (no cookies, no localStorage)
• No tracking, no third-party analytics
• No IP addresses, no fingerprints, no user-agent logging
• Search logs only in normalised form; timestamps max. date + hour
• AI transparency notice next to search (EU AI Act)

Data sources

• GISA / BMWET via data.gv.at (CC BY 4.0)
• RIS – Federal Legal Information System (CC BY 4.0)
• Data status and attribution permanently shown in the site footer

Architecture (overview)

Static frontend + serverless search API on AWS (eu-central-1). Domain data lives as prepared JSON artefacts in S3 — without a classic domain database and without a vector database.

Search pipeline

1. Query normalisation (without storing the raw text)
2. Cache lookup in DynamoDB
3. Lexical search + substring matching
4. Semantic search over precomputed embeddings
5. Reciprocal Rank Fusion of result lists
6. Optional LLM ranking with fit filter and orientation texts
7. Anonymous logging and response to the client

When the global LLM budget is exhausted, search continues without AI ranking (lexical fallback) — protection against cost spikes and abuse.

On the client, MiniSearch adds offline-capable search in the build.

Outcome

• Fast orientation before trade registration — in everyday language instead of administrative German
• Official wordings & keys from public sources, transparently attributed
• Privacy-friendly: no accounts, no tracking, no personal data
• Cost-safe: budget limits and fallback without AI ranking
• EU operations: AWS Frankfurt (eu-central-1)

Tech stack

Deliberate non-goals

• No legal advice / no binding authority decision
• No user accounts, no CRM, no analytics stack
• No Docker, no Redux/Zustand, no vector database for the wordings

This project shows Monadion’s ability to deliver a publicly usable domain product end to end: concept, AI-supported search, privacy by design, serverless AWS operations and ongoing data maintenance — from a single partner.