Cardano Knowledge Maps

Interactive knowledge maps of the Cardano ecosystem — governance, smart contracts, and more.

Live: https://lambdasistemi.github.io/cardano-knowledge-maps/

What is this

A browsable knowledge graph mapping the relationships between entities, processes, and concepts across the Cardano ecosystem: CIP-1694 governance, the Plutus smart-contract stack, the Conway transaction vocabulary, and the Cardano Budget 2026 proposals. Click any node to see its description and links to source documentation; use Views to focus on a specific topic.

This repository is data-only. It holds Turtle RDF graph sources, a SPARQL query catalog, and guided tours; it contains no application code. The viewer is provided by graph-browser, and CI assembles the site from pinned graph-browser releases with zero build tools in this repo.

All instance data is grounded in a hand-authored OWL ontology built on standard W3C vocabularies (PROV-O, ORG, SKOS, OWL-Time, FOAF, Dublin Core), so the same triples can be queried by graph-browser, Protégé, Oxigraph, or any SPARQL endpoint.

Architecture

flowchart LR
  subgraph Data["data/ (this repo)"]
    Config["config.json<br/>viewer config, kinds, graphSources"]
    Graphs["rdf/*.ttl<br/>ontology + topic graphs"]
    Queries["queries.json<br/>SPARQL query catalog"]
    Tours["tutorials/*.json<br/>guided tours"]
  end
  subgraph Deploy["pages.yml (push to main)"]
    Validate["validate-action<br/>JSON schemas + RDF parse"]
    Build["build-action<br/>viewer + data → site/"]
    Vocab["vocab-publish-action<br/>cardano.ontology.ttl → site/vocab/cardano"]
  end
  Site["GitHub Pages<br/>lambdasistemi.github.io/cardano-knowledge-maps"]
  Data --> Validate
  Validate --> Build
  Build --> Vocab
  Vocab --> Site

Loading

The instance graph is split by topic; the runtime composes the 19 sources listed in data/config.json::graphSources (sources marked "background": true are always loaded and hidden from the viewer's Sources toggle list).

• data/rdf/cardano.ontology.ttl — Cardano domain ontology (OWL classes + object properties, W3C vocabularies); also published as a dereferenceable namespace document at /vocab/cardano
• data/rdf/cardano.ttl — shared cross-cutting instance nodes (Plutus, Conway era, ExUnits, ...) referenced by multiple focuses
• data/rdf/transactions.ttl — Conway transaction vocabulary, vendored from cardano-ledger-rdf; pinned per data/rdf/PINNED.md
• data/rdf/governance.ttl — CIP-1694 governance: actors, action types, processes, treasury, parameters
• data/rdf/smart-contracts.ttl — Plutus stack, languages, runtimes, dApps, Vasil features, Hydra L2
• data/rdf/budget-2026/*.ttl — one TTL per Cardano Budget 2026 proposal, plus shared proposers.ttl
• data/config.json — viewer configuration (kinds, colors, shapes, source labels)
• data/queries.json — SPARQL query catalog (35 queries; entries tagged "view" drive the Views menu)
• data/tutorials/ — 19 guided tours listed in data/tutorials/index.json

Quickstart

Browse the live site, or load the data through the hosted universal viewer:

https://lambdasistemi.github.io/graph-browser/?repo=lambdasistemi/cardano-knowledge-maps

To serve the site locally:

nix build                  # assembles viewer + data into ./result
npx serve result -p 10001  # or: just serve

Usage

In the viewer:

• Views button — switch between topic-specific lenses
• Click a node to re-center and see its description
• Hover an edge to see why the relationship exists
• Depth buttons (1, 2, 3, All) control neighborhood size
• Guided Tours — narrative walkthroughs per view

The graph can also be queried outside the viewer: every data/rdf/*.ttl file is plain Turtle, parseable by any RDF toolchain.

Documentation

• data/rdf/PINNED.md — provenance and refresh procedure for the vendored transaction vocabulary
• .specify/memory/constitution.md — the project's data-authoring principles (RDF-first, ontology alignment, semantic completeness)
• For AI agents, start at AGENTS.md

Development

The dev shell provides Python with rdflib, just, jq, and the EYE reasoner:

nix develop
just validate   # parse every graphSources TTL via rdflib
just owl-smoke  # OWL 2 RL inference smoke fixtures via EYE
just build      # nix build of the deployable site
just ci         # build + validate + owl-smoke

CI runs the graph-browser validate-action (JSON schemas, RDF parsing, referential integrity) on every PR and publishes a static preview of the assembled site as a PR comment.

Contributing

Edit the topic TTL whose subject your statements concern. If a node is genuinely shared between focuses (referenced as a subject from one and as a target from another, or both), promote it to cardano.ttl. Every node needs a cardano: type and every edge predicate a cardano: property definition in cardano.ontology.ttl. Edit data/queries.json for queries, data/tutorials/ for tours.

Disclaimer

Graph data was generated by AI based on publicly available Cardano documentation. Not formally reviewed or endorsed by any Cardano entity. Verify against CIP-1694 and Cardano documentation.