How to Explore Your Knowledge Graph

Once you’ve built a knowledge graph from your vault, the analytics layer turns the visualization into a research workbench. This guide shows you how to use the insights panel, path finder, sizing modes, and one-click Wikipedia lookup.

Prerequisites

• A vault with a built knowledge graph
• The graph must have entities and connections (single isolated entities won’t surface much)

Open the insights panel

With the knowledge graph view active, click the chart icon in the toolbar (top-right of the canvas, next to the document selector). The Insights panel slides in from the right.

The first time you open it, Daneel computes all analytics in one pass. For graphs of a few thousand entities this takes under a second; larger graphs show a “Analyzing graph…” progress indicator.

The panel has four collapsible cards. Key Entities and Graph Health are open by default; Topics and Bridges are collapsed.

Find your most important entities

The Key Entities card lists the top 12 entities ranked by structural importance — entities that are connected to other well-connected entities (not just entities mentioned the most often).

Each row shows:

• Rank number
• A colored dot for the entity type
• The entity name
• The type label
• A bar showing the relative importance score

Click any entity to focus the 3D view on that entity’s neighborhood (the same as clicking it in the graph). The Wikipedia panel opens automatically with matching articles.

Discover topics

Click the Topics card header to expand it. Daneel groups entities into topical clusters by analyzing which entities frequently appear together in the same documents.

Each topic shows:

• A colored dot (the topic’s color in the graph when in “Color: Topic” mode)
• An auto-generated label using the top two entities (e.g., “Einstein & Bohr”)
• The number of entities in the topic
• A small bar showing the type distribution within the topic

Click any topic to filter the 3D view to only show that cluster — non-topic entities are hidden, leaving a clean view of just the topic and its internal connections.

To return to the full graph, click the Reset view button (bottom-right of the canvas).

Topics with fewer than 2 entities are filtered out of the list to reduce noise.

Find bridge entities

The Bridges card lists entities that connect otherwise separate parts of the graph. These are the structural “connectors” — remove them and the graph would fragment.

Bridges are useful for spotting:

• Researchers who span multiple fields
• Concepts that link different topics
• Institutions that bridge geographies
• Anything that acts as a hub between communities

Click any bridge entity to focus on its neighborhood in the 3D view.

Check graph health

The Graph Health card shows a traffic-light status:

• Good (green): the graph is well-connected, with most entities forming a single cluster
• Fair (amber): some gaps detected — multiple separate clusters
• Poor (red): heavily fragmented, many disconnected pieces

Below the status, four metrics:

• Clusters: total number of disconnected components
• Isolated: entities with no connections at all
• Main cluster: percentage of entities in the largest connected component
• Density: how interconnected the graph is overall

If the status is amber or red, the card also shows a Possible duplicates section — entity pairs that look similar enough to suggest entity resolution missed them (e.g., “luminiferous ether” and “luminiferous aether”). These are candidates for manual cleanup.

Find a connection between two entities

Click the path finder icon (looks like two connected circles) in the toolbar. The Path Finder panel replaces the Insights panel.

1. Type into the From field and select a source entity from the autocomplete dropdown
2. Type into the To field and select a target entity
3. Click Find connection

If a path exists, Daneel shows:

• The shortest chain of entities connecting the two
• The number of hops and total connection weight
• Edge provenance (which co-occurrence count established each link)
• An expandable alternative paths section if multiple shortest paths exist

The path is highlighted in the 3D view — path entities are colored, everything else is dimmed.

If no path exists, the entities are in different clusters and aren’t connected via your corpus.

Change what node size represents

By default, node size reflects mention count — frequently mentioned entities appear larger. The toolbar dropdown lets you switch:

• Size: Mentions — original behavior, biggest nodes are most-mentioned
• Size: Importance — biggest nodes are structurally important (PageRank)
• Size: Bridges — biggest nodes are bridge entities (betweenness)
• Size: Connectivity — biggest nodes have the most connections (degree)

Switching modes preserves the layout — only the visual sizes change, so you can compare the same graph from different angles.

The sizing uses a value-based curve (not a flat ranking), so dramatic outliers stay dramatic. A handful of high-PageRank entities will tower over the rest, just as in the underlying data.

Switch to topic colors

The toolbar also has a Color dropdown:

• Color: Type — default, entities colored by their ontology type (person, location, etc.)
• Color: Topic — entities colored by the topic cluster they belong to

When you switch to topic colors, the bottom-left legend changes to show topic labels instead of entity types. Click any topic in the legend to filter the view to that topic.

Look up entities on Wikipedia

When you click any node in the 3D view, two things happen at once:

1. The graph focuses on the entity’s neighborhood (using the depth setting in the toolbar)
2. A Wikipedia panel appears in the top-left corner with matching articles

The Wikipedia search uses the entity’s name as a prefix query and returns up to 10 matching pages with thumbnails and short descriptions.

Click any result to fetch the article, convert it to readable text, and display it in the document viewer pane on the right of the screen. Click the small external-link icon to open the article on wikipedia.org in a new tab instead.

Wikipedia results are cached locally for 7 days to avoid repeated API calls.

To close the Wikipedia panel, click its X button. To clear the article from the document viewer, click the X in the article’s header.

Resize the analytics panel

The analytics and path finder panels share a draggable handle on their left edge. Click and drag to resize between 220 and 500 pixels wide. Useful when entity names are long.

Reset everything

The floating Reset view button appears in the bottom-right of the 3D canvas whenever any focus, highlight, or topic filter is active. Click it to clear all filters and return to the full graph.

Next steps

• For background on what these algorithms actually compute, see Graph Analytics
• For configuration of the underlying knowledge graph, see Settings reference
• For the broader knowledge graph concept, see Knowledge Graphs