user manual

Conzept is an attempt to create an encyclopedia for the 21st century.

A modern topic-exploration tool based on: Wikipedia, Wikidata, the Open Library, Archive.org, YouTube, the GBIF and many other information sources. A semantic web app build for: fun, education and research.

Conzept allows you to explore any of the millions of topics on Wikipedia from many different angles - such as science, art, digital books and education - both as a defined semantic entity (“thing”) as well as a string. Client-side topic-classification in addition allows for a fast, higher-level logic throughout the whole user experience.

The application also has an uniquely integrated user-interface, which gives you a clean, well-designed view of all this information (in any of the 300+ Wikipedia languages), without cognitive overload.

The Conzept project is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 (unless noted otherwise in the code) and the code repository is hosted on GitHub. Development news is announced on Twitter.

Although Wikipedia is great and getting better all the time, I (Jama Poulsen) felt that the encyclopedic information could be presented better and have more integration with other major sources of information on the web.

Each Wikipedia “article” actually relates to a multi-faceted concept, which we ideally should be able to easily explore. This is what Conzept strives to be a good tool for. To help anyone to explore and learn about topics of their interest, in an effective and enjoyable way.

The main goals of Conzept are:

• A more holistic presentation of the encyclopedic information contained within Wikipedia and Wikidata by integrating and linking with other information sources.

• Significantly improving the user experience when taking in that wealth of information, by trying to reduce the cognitive-load and making the learning experience as fun and inspiring as possible.

• Innovate where possible and useful, based on human-centered design principles. This project is an ever-evolving tool, within an increasingly connected world of people and their creative works.

• Make the project free software and its use and development accessible for all. Find sustainable ways to support its maintenance, development and collaboration.

The layout of Conzept consists of two main areas:

• the sidebar
• and one or two content panes

From the sidebar you can:

• Do a search and browse the search results. More topics will be loaded in the sidebar as you scroll down to the bottom of the search results.

• Manage your bookmarks

• Change the settings (content language, interface language (locale), font, theme, text-to-speech voice, etc.)

• Use additional tools (go to a random topic, compare topics, manage ambient audio, fullscreen the app, clone the current tab, etc.)

The content pane area can consist of one or two sub-panes (depending on the content). The general workflow of all these panes is from left-to-right. So the sidebar directs the content pane. If the content pane has two sub-panes visible, the left sub-pane will direct the right sub-pane.

The action buttons allow for doing something with a topic, like eg. viewing videos or browsing books related to it. Each topic has a visible set of main actions buttons and a set of hidden categorized action buttons.

The main action buttons show the most common and essential buttons for a topic. Note that each topic has an “explore-this-topic” action button, which can be used to do a search for that particular topic string.

The categorized action buttons can be shown by clicking on the triangle symbol. These buttons are grouped by categories like: video, audio, art, science, biology and geography.

This concludes the introduction into the basic functions of Conzept. You should now be able to start exploring topics of your interest.