Sense Atlas

Sense Atlas is an organizational cartography kit. It helps you collaborate to build maps of projects, policies, and organizational knowledge, to support situation awareness and comprehension among people working together to achieve common goals.

This website is the floor model, a live, work-in-public, and mainly features maps pertaining to the development of Sense Atlas itself. Not only does this demonstrate what Sense Atlas does, it exposes its own development process for all to see.

Goals

The overarching goal of Sense Atlas is to support people at work by providing maps of structured information related to specific projects, the business ecosystem, and the surrounding information environment at large.

Robust and powerful shared information space

Great care has been taken to design the system underlying Sense Atlas to never break a link. This, in conjunction with a strategy of dense hypermedia, Sense Atlas creates a durable space within an organization where highly structured information is easy to find, use, and reuse.

Documentation without the overhead of documents

Simply put, documents make lousy documentation. They get misplaced, they go stale, they have poor internal addressability, and frankly, in a business setting, they are often just plain too much to read.

A linear narrative may be essential for persuasion, but when you've already bought in, just the facts will do. Not just the facts, actually, but facts connected in space, by well-defined semantic relations. In Sense Atlas, the links do at least some of the talking.

Anti-lock-in architecture

Sense Atlas is open-source software and communicates exclusively using open data standards. It has been designed so that 100% of its instance data can be exported and self-hosted, should you choose to do so.

Machine-actionable everything

Collaborative business software tends to suffer from the then-what problem: You put all your information in, do some operations, and then what?

All software has a boundary around its set of capabilities, and if you need something done that the software doesn't do, waiting for the vendor to implement it may not be an option. As such, having access to your data is the first step to repurposing it.

Access, however, is not enough. Your computer also needs to be able to interpret your data. The linked data vocabularies Sense Atlas uses can be fed directly into a processor and used to drive other systems.

Domains

Sense Atlas currently supports mapping the following thematic domains:

Concepts: Organizations run much more smoothly when people use the same words to mean the same things. It's doubly important that customers, constituents, and users understand what you mean when you say certain words. The concept scheme module is therefore a workspace for structuring taxonomies of concepts and reconciling understandings of terminology.
Issues: An issue is nothing more than a state of affairs in the world that needs something done about it. Software developers have had issue trackers for decades; this is an issue tracker for issues that are bigger than software. The issue-based information system module is the beating heart of Sense Atlas, and the original module that spurred its development.
Projects: A project can be viewed as graduating a set of issues into goals and their associated tasks, along with concrete targets for completing those tasks. The project planning module, which is currently under active development, can be used for conventional resource planning, or for a novel value-based methodology.

There are several more domains in the pipe and coming in hot:

Corporate social network analysis: There is enormous value in mapping out the entities—and types of entities—present in a business ecosystem, as well as how they relate to each other. This includes partners, vendors, competitors, institutions, governments and regulatory bodies, their key people, their products, and so on.
Bibliographic records: Organizations tend to reference a number of information resources in their projects, internal policy documents, and external communications. It is valuable not only to concentrate these and make them available to everybody in your organization, but also link them back to the places from which they are referenced.
Content strategy: Organizations tend to produce a lot of content, both for internal consumption as well as communicating with customers, users, and the general public. This module will ease the process of creating content inventories for subsequent audits, as well as afford modeling audience segments to reconcile with existing and future content.
Plain-vanilla notes: Personal knowledge management software has demonstrated the value of being able to attach notes to anything, including other notes. As such, Sense Atlas will implement ordinary notes that you can attach to anything—including other notes—and effectively act as a note server for resources outside of Sense Atlas.

While these modules are useful on their own, the real power is in putting them together. Furthermore, in principle, Sense Atlas can represent any mix of linked data vocabularies, either off the shelf, or purpose-made. Clients are invited to inquire about custom extensions and visualizations.

Who benefits from Sense Atlas?

Sense Atlas was created initially to support the software development process. There is nothing, however, inherent to Sense Atlas that is specific to software development, only that software development tends to feature a large number of interacting concerns that requires a structure like Sense Atlas to faithfully represent.

For example, anybody who undertakes complex projects can benefit from the planning modules, like:

Architects
Engineers
Building contractors

The IBIS module works just as well for policy analysis—including contracts, treaties, and legislation—as it does for design rationale. This makes it useful for:

Lawyers
Risk managers
Think-tankers
Unions
Professional associations

Forthcoming modules, such as the corporate social network and bibliographic records will be of particular interest to journalists and academics.

How much does it cost?

For the duration of the private alpha period, Sense Atlas is free:

for your team, with a consulting agreement,
alternatively, both Sense Atlas and its substrate Intertwingler are open-source, but you're on your own with that.

How do I get it?

Sense Atlas is currently available at no extra charge to clients of Method & Structure Consulting, through a guided service to populate each team's individual knowledge graph, and train the team on its use. This private alpha program is slated to run for about a year while it undergoes development into a fully-fledged hosted software product. If you run a team and are interested in adding organizational cartography to your repertoire, by all means reach out.

Let's talk. Click here to send an email.

In addition to clients, we will be admitting a few individuals into the alpha program, although capacity for support will be limited. Do inquire if you are interested in participating.

Who made Sense Atlas?

Sense Atlas is the work of Dorian Taylor, of Method & Structure Consulting.

Development priorities and non-priorities

Sense Atlas is being actively developed concurrently with its substrate, Intertwingler, a novel application server designed to facilitate the creation of knowledge graphs and other dense hypermedia systems, of which Sense Atlas is an example.

Priorities

Sense Atlas is brand-new software. Development priorities for the first year will be set in conjunction with the needs of the participants of the private alpha program. Notwithstanding, here are some themes where work is immediately planned:

Response time: Sense Atlas is using a specific development technique, and running on top of a novel application server. It was important to first get it running correctly, without compromising certain architectural constraints. Now that it works, the focus can shift to speeding it up.
Collections: The collection pages—concept schemes and issue networks—are still extremely bare-bones, and are slated to get a proper glow-up.
Global edit history: Because all state data of Sense Atlas is fully addressable, it should be possible in principle to undo any change, all the way back to the first interaction. The plan is to implement a transaction history directly into the underlying database—where it belongs—and to do this soon.
Attachments: While Sense Atlas is not intended to serve as yet another file repository, it is obviously useful to see things like link previews, profile pictures, and other opaque data objects. These capabilities are all routed through the same infrastructure in the underlying application server as what handles the internal caching, already mentioned as another high-priority item.
Integrations: Sense Atlas recognizes that other applications and information services exist in the world, and that many of them are popular. We will be targeting a few essential integrations (conventional bug trackers, cloud storage services, etc.) during the private alpha, pending input from clients.
Alternative visualizations: Sense Atlas uses an innovative hyperbolic radial Sugiyama layout for its main visualization, which is under active development. We recognize, moreover, that there are situations where other visual representations are more appropriate.
Accessibility: Sense Atlas uses a colourful palette to delineate all the different entities and relationships. Marshalling the palette at all was a challenge, though plans are in place to create palettes that account for the different—and mutually conflicting—forms of colour blindness. Screen reader support is likewise planned, pending a strategy to coalesce accessibility metadata with existing embedded semantic metadata.
Real-time collaboration: Since Sense Atlas is ultimately a collaborative tool, support real-time updates to the knowledge graph state, so you can see when others on your team change something.

Non-priorities

Mobile interface: A proper treatment for mobile is going to have to figure out how to cram a metric tonne of information onto a tiny screen. There is a lot of stuff flying around right now, and it's going to have to settle down a bit first before serious thought is given to mobile—though serious thought will be given to mobile.
Artificial intelligence: Sense Atlas is a tool for supporting your intelligence. While you could easily pump out your instance data and do AI things to it, and while there may be certain applicability for AI in the future, there is currently very little within Sense Atlas for AI to do.
Whizz-bang visual effects: Cutesy animations are extraordinarily time-consuming to implement and will only be considered for the time being if they solve a more substantive problem in the interface.
Server round-trips: The prototype that preceded Sense Atlas was developed initially to test a lightweight protocol for manipulating knowledge graph data using only ordinary HTML forms. While the interaction is not as smooth as client-side scripting affords, this keeps the number of moving parts down when both the data schema and the interface to display and control it are in flux. We can easily replace it with the slicker interaction as these concerns stiffen.