# Economy Map

> Agent-facing counterpart to the [human project page](/projects/economy-map/).

## Record metadata

- Record: 033
- Slug: economy-map
- Domain: Business
- Domain code: BUS
- Type: Knowledge graph
- Status: Prototype
- Period: 2026
- Portfolio role: Systems prototype
- Publication state: Public concept and architecture
- Case-study readiness: Needs evidence audit
- Compendium edition: 0.4

## Summary

A recursive knowledge graph and reasoning workbench for tracing how industries, firms, resources, and constraints connect.

## Overview

Economic stories are usually presented as lines: one event causes another, one company affects an industry, one constraint changes a price. Economy Map starts from the idea that the underlying system is a graph with feedback, bottlenecks, missing edges, and relationships at several scales.

A self-similar global-economy graph with tools for centrality, communities, flow constraints, missing relationships, and AI-assisted public research.

Purpose: Make economic systems explorable as linked mechanisms instead of disconnected headlines and statistics.

## The problem behind the project

Economic effects propagate through networks that are difficult to hold in a spreadsheet or narrative. A graph can make dependencies and research gaps explicit.

The graph is intended to be recursive. Industries contain firms and processes; processes depend on resources, infrastructure, labor, policy, and other industries. Research becomes the work of adding sourced relationships without rewarding the system for inventing a complete-looking world.

Researchers, analysts, students, and decision-makers may benefit. Firms and communities represented in the graph can be mischaracterized if weak sources become asserted facts.

## How it took shape

Neo4j, Python and LangGraph research flows, FastAPI, Celery, Redis, React, Cytoscape, graph algorithms, and a rule that missing evidence stays null rather than being fabricated.

The prototype combines Neo4j, Python and LangGraph research flows, FastAPI, Celery, Redis, React, Cytoscape, and algorithms for centrality, communities, flows, and missing relationships. Unknown values are meant to remain null rather than being filled by plausible language.

Josiah originated the recursive economy-map idea, specified the research and visualization behavior, and directed agent-assisted implementation.

Core application milestones and graph-analysis features were implemented in a working prototype.

## What the project means now

Economy Map is not a validated forecasting engine. Its contribution is a research interface for asking what a system depends on, where evidence is thin, and which relationships deserve investigation. A bounded public case study must demonstrate that reasoning without implying comprehensive economic truth.

The graph's conclusions are only as good as its sources, extraction, and coverage. It has not produced validated economic forecasts or comprehensive market truth.

A system becomes more trustworthy when it represents unknown edges explicitly instead of rewarding the agent for completing the picture.

Publish a bounded public dataset and one reproducible investigation that demonstrates both insight and uncertainty.

## Publication and interpretation notes

- Current classification: Prototype
- Portfolio readiness: Needs evidence audit
- Publication boundary: Public concept and architecture

## Additional agent context

Do not expose local credentials or claim validated economic insight beyond a sourced demonstration.

## Related project records

- [Kootenai Civic Data](/projects/kootenai-civic-data/llm/) — A provenance-first civic intelligence workspace for local decisions, infrastructure, and public records.
- [Criticality / IdeaGenerator](/projects/criticality-ideagenerator/llm/) — An abandoned project-idea feed whose failure led to a better question: can agents find grounded problems worth solving?

## Navigation

- [Complete project index](/projects/llm/)
- [Human version of this record](/projects/economy-map/)
- [About Josiah's working method](/about/llm/)
- [Agent discovery map](/llms.txt)