Uwazi research
Uwazi’s Library turned into a research and OSINT tool. Every fact says who said it, and a researcher’s questions get answered on one screen.
Twenty questions
Uwazi stores evidence well and answers questions about it badly. A researcher wants to know which sources support a claim and which dispute it, who held an office on a given day, what happened in one district, and what connects two people who were never in the same room.
I started with twenty such questions, tested against a real corpus. The Library could answer five on one screen, nine by hand, and six not at all. The fix was not more filters: every link and field became a claim with sources behind it.
Who says so
Every field shows how many sources stand behind it, which publishers, what each wrote, and whether the value is confirmed, single-source or disputed; on one event the start time is contested. A claim opens on its evidence: publishers in rows, Supports and Disputes in columns, the quote in each cell. Wire copies count once.
An Evidence view does the same across a collection, with a strength bar of supporting against disputing publishers. Footage traced elsewhere by fact-checkers opens as Misattributed, the distressing part covered.
Where, who, when
A filter can now reach through a link: Event, then Where, then Kathmandu District returns what happened there or anywhere inside it, and Who narrows it by the people involved. Time and place are one view: the time strip, the map and the list read the same filter, and a view can be shared as a link.
What connects them
Every link now carries its status and dates, and an As of date answers who held what on a given day. Connect to finds the shortest paths between two records, each hop with its status, so a path through a single-source link reads as weaker. The whole collection is also a Network you can search.
One clock
The Sync view puts every recording of an event on one wall clock: phone videos, body cameras and 911 calls as lanes, lined up by the bursts they share. Click the clock and it opens each recording at that second, and flags recordings whose clocks drift.
The notebook
The Notebook pins records and builds a citation list from the pinned evidence (quote, publisher, URL, status, page), exported as text, Markdown or CSV. A reference that cites page seven of a source PDF opens it at page seven.
Not shipped
A prototype on mock data, with no backend. Whether any of it reaches Uwazi is Huridocs’ decision. It was tested on three public collections: the Nepal protests (2,124 records, 23 government PDFs), the Las Vegas shooting (582 records, 132 phone videos and the 911 calls on one clock), and CEJIL’s archive of the Inter-American system (4,398 records).