Products & Services

Knowledge Mappers is a unique, digital mapping consultancy & publishing company, producing ground-breaking knowledge products & services that ‘visually connect’ people with what they need to know so they can do what they need to do. We do this utilising our twin skillsets in varying combinations…

Our first passion is the mapping, analysis and sharing of geographic information (GI) – ie. the knowledge about the ‘places & spaces’ that make up our physical world and our interactions with them – and we have over 50 years of collective experience covering all aspects…

From it’s initial sourcing / capture, spatial analysis using GIS (from every day mapping tools like Google Maps and Google Earth, to full blown analysis software like ESRI, MapInfo and QGIS), and publishing & sharing with expert & non-expert stakeholders alike as both online map-enabled data portals and large format paper maps.

Indeed our School Travel Health Check (STHC) spatial analysis service – which was born out of an initial GI consultancy project to provide high quality, spatial intelligence data to one local authority, it’s school communities and other stakeholders interested in how children travel to their school, from where, and how far they travel to get there – has been combining all of our GI skills in a nationally available, ‘one-stop shop’ service since 2005.

We are also passionate about the development of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) at all levels to ensure that this key knowledge about their world is accessible to all who need it – be they members of the GI Professional Community or communities defined geographically – and they have the capacity to use it to support them in whatever it is they need to do, once they have it.

Note we are a registered data processor with the UK Information Commissioner (ICO).

Our other passion is combining that same unique range of data / information / knowledge hunting & cartographic expertise with Corel (formerly ‘Mindjet’) MindManager – the world’s best information (‘mind’) mapping software – to create multi-function knowledge maps (‘hierarchical tree diagrams’) that visually capture not only the various individual elements that make up just about any ‘knowledge space’ and the ‘spatial’ inter-relationships between them, but also the (potentially 1000’s of) official / definitive / plain old useful knowledge resources available about them in the public domain. So they are an interactive map, a visualy structured ‘discover within the bigger picture context’ index of online knowledge resources, and a ‘minimal-click’ portal to those resources all in one.

We began using MindManager to map the knowledge in our own ‘business space’ in 2002, but soon realised the technique could also be applied to mapping knowledge about the ‘real world geographic spaces’ with which we were familiar (or so we thought!), and then the everyday ‘time spaces’ that rule our lives. In fact we realised that we could use it to map – and bring clarity to – just about any ‘knowledge space’ that we humans have created to conceptually structure, physically manage and navigate our world on a day to day basis.

(Note you can see here an illustrated ‘walk through’ of the process of turning an official spreadsheet of information found in the online public domain into a visually structured knowledge map, taken from our ScotlandTheMap project).

Realising the value of these new ‘knowledge atlas’ and ‘knowledge calendar’ maps to everybody trying to build a better world (or at least their bit of it) – whilst simultaneously struggling with information overload and getting all the other stakeholders ‘on the same page’ – we decided to share them via our digital download map store, in both HTML5 and MindManager (.mmap) format. HTML versions (an export feature unique to MindManager) can be viewed by anybody using any modern browser, on any device, on or offline, without the need for any plugins, whilst anybody with access to MindManager software can use the original MindManager format maps as ‘ready made’ templates to amend, adapt & repurpose (in whole or in part) in their own projects so they do not have to re-invent the knowledge wheel each time. (MindManager is more usually famed for it’s rich feature set for project planning & execution.)

We also offer a bespoke knowledge mapping service for clients – especially for communities – as well as consultancy & training. Along with our fellow partners in the MindManager International Value Added Partner (MIVAP) Network we also offer a complete MindManager consultancy service to help others to get the most value from this most amazing digital tool.