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KnowledgeMap

KnowledgeMap is a 3D, grid-based visualization component that turns documentation and knowledge graphs into a navigable “city”.

It is domain-agnostic: you can map software architectures, product landscapes, research areas, compliance topics, onboarding knowledge, or anything else that benefits from clear boundaries + interactive navigation.

Built on deck.gl – no OSM, no GPS, no map tiles. This is a synthetic world.

What it does

KnowledgeMap renders a structured knowledge space as a city-like scene:

  • World (Grid) A discrete grid world. All elements snap to cells → stable layouts, deterministic diffs, reviewable changes.

  • Cities (Categories / Domains / Areas) High-level categories. Cities define scope boundaries and provide an anchor for navigation and theming.

  • Districts (Sub-areas / Components / Capabilities) Sub-structure inside a city. Districts represent coherent clusters (modules, features, topics, teams, etc.).

  • Buildings (Knowledge Entities) Individual entities, typically backed by Markdown. Buildings can carry metadata (owner, tags, maturity, risk, references, etc.).

  • Height encodes relevance Building height can reflect importance/relevance:

    • curated manually, or
    • derived from metrics (e.g., centrality, usage, incident frequency, dependency fan-in)

  • Roads / Pipes (Flows) Animated routes visualize how information, responsibility, or dependencies move through the landscape. This is not “static arrows”; it’s flow you can see.

Why a “knowledge city”?

Classic docs and graphs are great at listing facts but bad at:

  • making boundaries obvious
  • showing flows and integration surfaces
  • giving teams a shared spatial memory (“where does this belong?”)

A city metaphor is a pragmatic trick: people remember places better than nested menus and graph hairballs.

Key properties

  • Grid-first: deterministic coordinates, versionable maps, stable mental model
  • Separation of concerns:
    • map structure as data (JSON)
    • entity content as docs (Markdown)
  • Interactive navigation: focus, hover meta, deep links, jump-to-entity
  • Theming: color and styling per city/district (with restraint, please)