Innovaforte Evidence Compass
From evidence to decision.
Turn fragmented research, guidance, documents and data into structured, navigable and traceable knowledge.
Who
Organisations working with large, complex or fragmented bodies of evidence, research, guidance and institutional knowledge.
What
A structured environment for discovering, organising, connecting, interrogating and navigating evidence.
Why
Critical knowledge is often distributed across publications, databases, reports, guidance, spreadsheets and institutional systems. Finding the right evidence — and understanding how it relates — can require substantial expert effort.
How
Combine structured data, documents, taxonomies, search, visualisation and carefully governed intelligent tools around the organisation's existing evidence and expertise.
First implementation
Violence Prevention Evidence Compass
Pilot implementation
A focused implementation of the Evidence Compass approach for navigating and connecting evidence related to violence prevention. This pilot demonstrates how the broader Evidence Compass model can be applied to a specific evidence domain.
Evidence Compass is the broader Innovaforte evidence capability. Evidence Compass VP is a focused working demonstration of it: a pilot implementation for the violence-prevention evidence domain.
Status: pilot implementation and private demonstration, created for evaluation and concept development. It is not a production service and does not represent a client deployment, endorsement or validation.
Explore Evidence Compass VP ↗One model. Many evidence domains.
The same underlying approach can be adapted to different evidence environments — changing the sources, taxonomy, entities, relationships and user journeys while preserving the core Evidence Compass architecture.
- Public health
- Legal and regulatory evidence
- Transport and mobility
- Banking and financial regulation
- Emergency operations
- Environmental evidence
- Corporate knowledge
- Policy and programme evidence
These are examples of possible application domains only, not clients, deployments or existing implementations.
The challenge
The evidence exists. Finding what matters is harder.
A single organisation may hold:
- Thousands of publications
- Multiple databases
- Guidance documents
- Reports
- Evidence reviews
- Spreadsheets
- Classifications
- Institutional knowledge
- Changing terminology
- Disconnected repositories
The objective is not to replace expert review.
It is to reduce the effort required to:
- Find relevant material
- Understand relationships
- Identify patterns
- Compare evidence
- Trace sources
- Explore gaps
- Prepare analysis
- Navigate from a question back to its supporting evidence
Capability model
Ten capabilities, one evidence environment.
This is the Evidence Compass capability model. It describes the intended scope of the approach; not every capability is a production feature.
Discover
Find relevant evidence across structured and unstructured sources.
Structure
Organise evidence using classifications, metadata, taxonomies and relationships.
Connect
Link publications, interventions, outcomes, populations, locations, topics, organisations and other relevant entities.
Explore
Navigate evidence visually and interactively rather than relying only on lists and keyword search.
Interrogate
Allow users to ask questions of the evidence within clearly defined boundaries.
Compare
Support structured comparison across studies, interventions, topics, populations or other dimensions.
Trace
Keep conclusions, summaries and displayed information connected to their underlying sources.
Synthesise
Help experts bring together relevant information without pretending that automated output replaces expert interpretation.
Visualise
Turn complex evidence structures into useful maps, dashboards, relationships and views.
Act
Help users move from evidence discovery toward informed human decisions.
Human control
Evidence informs. People decide.
Evidence Compass is designed to strengthen expert work, not replace expert judgement.
Technology can
- Organise information
- Connect sources
- Improve discovery
- Surface relationships
- Prepare comparisons
- Identify potentially relevant evidence
- Support structured analysis
- Visualise complex information
- Improve traceability
- Reduce repetitive research work
People remain responsible for
- Interpreting evidence
- Assessing quality
- Understanding context
- Resolving conflicting evidence
- Professional judgement
- Policy decisions
- Scientific conclusions
- Ethical decisions
- Approving recommendations
- Accountability
The system should make it easier to understand why information appears and where it came from.
Traceability
Follow the answer back to the evidence.
A useful evidence system should not simply produce an answer. It should help users understand the evidence behind it.
- 01Question
- 02Relevant evidence
- 03Structured relationships
- 04Source material
- 05Original reference
Possible capabilities
- Source citations
- Document references
- Evidence metadata
- Study identifiers
- Linked source material
- Extraction provenance
- Version information
- Confidence and context indicators where appropriate
Automated confidence or context indicators are aids to navigation. They do not represent scientific certainty.
Conceptual architecture
Built around the evidence you already have.
This is a conceptual architecture. It describes how an Evidence Compass can be assembled; it does not imply that every source connector already exists.
Sources
Research publications · Guidance · Reports · Databases · Structured datasets · Spreadsheets · Institutional documents · APIs · Existing knowledge systems
Evidence layer
Ingestion · Normalisation · Metadata · Taxonomies · Entities · Relationships · Provenance · Search indexes
Evidence Compass
Search · Explore · Compare · Ask · Visualise · Map · Filter · Trace
Expert use
Research · Programme design · Policy · Analysis · Briefing · Decision support · Knowledge management