Explorer: Brainstorming maps of connected science

A Connected Search Engine revolutionizes how teams access and utilize information by breaking down data silos, reducing app-switching, and transforming fragmented knowledge into real-time, actionable insights. With Nextnet, you can unify search across multiple applications, leverage AI-driven relevance and personalization, enhance collaboration, and seamlessly integrate with your existing tools—all in one powerful platform.

Yes, they represent the same concept. A knowledge graph is a widely recognized term in software development and bioinformatics, referring to structured data connections. However, for broader accessibility, Nextnet uses knowledge maps to emphasize connectivity, visualization, and intuitive exploration. While “graph” often brings to mind line charts or bar graphs, a knowledge map better conveys the power of discovering relationships and insights within interconnected data.

The Map View is an interactive visual workspace that helps you brainstorm, explore, and connect complex ideas in an intuitive, dynamic way. It allows you to see relationships between concepts at a glance. The List View, on the other hand, presents results in a familiar card-based format, similar to Google search results, ranking information by relevance. You can switch between these views anytime based on your preferred way of analyzing data.

Nodes in Explorer are color-coded and icon-labeled to distinguish different data types. Hover over a node to see an At-a-Glance Card, a pop-up preview with key details. To explore deeper, click “View Details”, which opens a Data Card in a side panel with multiple sub-tabs for additional insights. We’re continuously expanding these data layers to provide richer context.

We have an exciting roadmap of features rolling out in 2025 to make Nextnet even more powerful:

• AI Overview – Get a high-level summary and ranking of key concepts surfaced by Explorer, helping you quickly understand relevance before diving deeper.
• Real-time collaborative comments – Team members with access to your workspace will be able to comment directly on the Map View, enabling real-time multi-player collaboration.
• Research Article Reader – Read and annotate scientific papers within a beautifully designed in-app reader.
• Expanded Node Exploration – Perform broad semantic web searches by expanding nodes to second, third, or higher-degree connections.
• Advanced Filtering Options – Including Temporal Analysis, which allows you to explore patterns over time and trace event sequences interactively.
• Common Property Finder – Discover shared properties between nodes to spot patterns, trends, and insights across massive datasets. This will be a game-changer for finding hidden connections, analyzing and exploring trends, and combining different filters and visualizations to generate some hypotheses worth sharing.

An ontology is a structured framework that systematically maps data to meaningful semantic concepts. Think of it as the language that connects data points, defining relationships between concepts such as diseases, genes, proteins, research articles, institutions, and more. Ontologies create a shared vocabulary that unifies disparate data sources, enabling collaboration, deeper analysis, and AI-powered research. At Nextnet, we define ontology as a foundational set of building blocks that map scientific and commercial concepts to the data that describes them. By standardizing semantics and defining categories of meaning, our ontology transforms scattered information into a structured knowledge system—empowering researchers to uncover hidden connections and accelerate discovery. We will publish a detailed blog post on the Nextnet ontology soon—stay tuned!