Introduction

Welcome to the official documentation of Contextualise, the simple and flexible open source tool particularly suited for organising information-heavy projects and activities consisting of unstructured and widely diverse data and information resources.

This page gives a broad presentation of Contextualise and of the contents of this documentation, so that you know where to start if you are a beginner or where to look if you need info on a specific feature.

About Contextualise

Contextualise is a versatile application that can be used in many different scenarios, including:

  • Investigative journalism

  • Personal knowledge management

  • Research projects

  • Worldbuilding and storytelling

  • Conceptualisation

  • Mind gardening and networked thought

Contextualise’s main dependency is TopicDB, an open source topic maps-based graph store. Topic maps provide a way to describe complex relationships between abstract concepts and real-world (information) resources.

About the Documentation

This documentation is continuously written, corrected, edited, and revamped by various contributors. It is edited via text files in the reStructuredText markup language and then compiled into a static website/offline document using the open source Sphinx and ReadTheDocs tools.

Note

You can contribute to Contextualise’s documentation by opening issue tickets or sending patches via pull requests on its GitHub source repository.

All the content of this repository is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0) with attribution to “Brett Kromkamp”.

Organization of the Documentation

This documentation is organized in five sections:

  • The General section contains this introduction as well as information about the Contextualise web application, its history, its licensing, authors and so forth.

  • The Getting Started section contains all the necessary information related to topic maps, Contextualise’s underlying data model.

  • The Tutorials section can be read as needed, in any order. It contains feature-specific tutorials and documentation.

  • The Development section is intended for advanced users and contributors to the application’s development.

  • The Community section gives information related to contributing to the application’s development and the life of its community, for example, how to report bugs, help with the documentation and so forth.

Have fun managing your personal knowledge with Contextualise!