A method of creating a database and of providing results from a database, for use by a municipality, and operating a community database, comprises the steps of: providing first and second source databases addressable under first and second data protocols respectively, which protocols are incompatible one with the other; transforming, comparing and reconciling the data in the first and second source databases in order to optimize each field of data in each record; and storing the optimized data for each record as a record in a resulting master database. Records from searches are presented in order of recency. The present invention also provides a method of generating revenue from activities associated with a community.