Contextualise has been soft-released! The alpha version of Contextualise is available at https://contextualise.dev. Sign up if you want to check it out.

Contextualise, is an application that allows you to manage your own personal knowledge, projects and research in a structured, but still lightweight, manner.

With Contextualise, I am really scratching my own itch. That is, I am developing Contextualise for my own needs: I am using the application to structure and document the development of Contextualise itself but also as a tool to organise and document my other hobbies and research projects. Although, as mentioned, I am developing Contextualise for my own needs, I really do hope that other people find it to be useful for their own purposes.

Contextualise is based on the concept of topic maps. Topic maps provide a way to describe complex relationships between abstract concepts and real-world (information) resources. In that respect, to really be able to make the most of Contextualise it is important to understand the topic maps paradigm: topics, occurrences and associations (and to a lesser degree, scopes).

Contextualise’s main dependency is TopicDB, an open source topic maps-based graph library which, in turn, uses PostgreSQL for persistence.

For more information about topic maps, check out the following articles:

Contextualise is far from being feature-complete. Nonetheless, the application in its current state provides all of the necessary functionality to be genuinely useful.

Finally, both Contextualise and TopicDB are opensource projects licensed with the permissive MIT license.

Contributing to Contextualise is easy:

  1. Check for open issues or open a fresh issue to start a discussion around a feature idea or a bug.
  2. Fork the repository on GitHub to start making your changes to the master branch (or branch off of it).
  3. Write a test which shows that the bug was fixed or that the feature works as expected.
  4. Send a pull request and bug the maintainer until it gets merged and published. :) Make sure to add yourself to AUTHORS.

I will periodically post updates as to how the project is progressing. If you have any questions with regards to Contextualise, just send me an email: info at contextualise dot dev.