metasphere

We are an interdisciplinary team of researchers, data scientists, designers and developers working on digital systems to facilitate the transformation of information to knowledge.

Our approach focusses on the flow of information with the aim to make complex interactions between a multitude of actors in the knowledge sphere more accessible, transparent and tangible.

Current developments

announcement

Mapping the COVID-19 information space

As research into COVID-19 is surging and a multitude of routes are being explored, the volume of produced papers makes maintaining oversight over the current state of research challenging. With the aim of getting new research teams working on COVID-19 related topics up to speed faster, an international group of volunteers is building a visual experience to provide a landscape of the current research as well as tools to enable researchers to collectively work through the amount of information being produced at faster rates and more effectively.

⟶  Learn more about our work on the COVID-19 research landscape.   We are looking for contributors  ⟶  Find out if you can help.

The metasphere approach

Our goal is to represent reality in ways that offer high resolution in terms of details while maintaining, to the extent possible, the complex nature of reality.

The idea here is to devise an approach and ultimately tools to a) allow for the preservation of complexity and b) make visible and thereby explorable the complex nature of information attributes. These two elements are vastly important to allow for the ability to follow trails of thoughts but also for the replicability of ideas and transparency of produced knowledge.

To address this, we explore how to allow for the preservation of complexity by leveraging visual and navigational metaphors borrowed from representations of the physical space to represent networked information.

The team

We are an international group of collaborators from diverse backgrounds. What brought us together is our passion for creating technical tools with a human perspective and the goal of enabling people to make more sense of an increasingly complex world.

Current team members are Julian Fleck, Yashar Mansoori, Kikuo Emoto, Dario Aschero, Ewa Knitter and Ricardo Saavedra.