// the find
brettkromkamp/contextualise
Contextualise is an effective tool particularly suited for organising information-heavy projects and activities consisting of unstructured and widely diverse data and information resources
Contextualise is a self-hosted Flask web app for building personal knowledge graphs using the topic maps standard — an ISO standard from the early 2000s for modeling relationships between concepts and resources. It's aimed at researchers, investigative journalists, and worldbuilders who want something more structured than Obsidian but don't want to run a full triple-store. SQLite backend keeps it deployable anywhere.
The topic maps data model is genuinely richer than the flat tag systems most note tools use — typed associations with named roles let you say 'Alice opposed Bob in the 1995 election' rather than just linking two nodes. The 3D scene viewer with glTF support is an unusual feature that makes sense for worldbuilding use cases. Geography and timeline visualizations are built in rather than bolted on later. The separation between TopicDB (the graph engine) and Contextualise (the UI) means you can query or manipulate your knowledge base programmatically without going through the web UI.
Full-text search is listed as a post-1.0 feature, which is a serious gap for any information-heavy project — you can navigate by association but can't find a note by its content. The documentation section in the README says 'Work in progress (February 2022)' and hasn't moved since, so you're largely on your own figuring out the data model. The default credentials in the README (admin@contextualise.dev / Passw0rd1) being committed to the repo is a red flag for anyone who deploys without reading carefully. Collaboration is Google Docs-style but there's no mention of conflict resolution, which gets painful quickly with concurrent edits on a SQLite backend.