Using Knowledge Surfaces

MARCUS includes advanced project-level views that help you understand a corpus beyond a single chat answer. These surfaces are useful when you are curating a project, reviewing a topic area, or trying to understand how multiple sources relate to one another.

These views are powerful, but they should be treated as interpretation aids. They do not replace the original documents.

What Counts As A Knowledge Surface

Depending on your deployment and feature configuration, this category may include:

• Knowledge Graph views
• Knowledge Pages
• Theme analysis or theme review workflows
• Evidence matrices

All of these aim to answer a similar meta-question: "What does this corpus contain, and how do its parts relate to each other?"

When To Use Knowledge Surfaces

Use them when you need to:

• Understand major topics across a project
• Compare overlapping sources
• Inspect relationships between concepts or documents
• Review where a corpus looks strong, thin, or inconsistent
• Build a teaching, policy, or governance view of the material

If chat is for answering one question, knowledge surfaces are for understanding the territory around that question.

A Practical Escalation Path

Many users get more value from MARCUS when they move through the product in this order:

1. Chat to ask a concrete question
2. Library to inspect the underlying sources
3. Knowledge surfaces to understand themes, relationships, and broader synthesis

This order works because it keeps you anchored in the original evidence before moving into more abstract summaries.

Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph helps visualize relationships inside the project. Depending on the current view, it may show:

• source-to-source relationships
• concept relationships
• freshness, coverage, or query-oriented perspectives

Good use cases:

• spotting which sources cluster together
• finding isolated or under-connected material
• seeing whether a topic is represented by one dominant source or many related sources

Do not use the graph alone to decide which source is "correct." Use it to identify where to look next.

Knowledge Pages

Knowledge Pages are project-level synthesis artifacts. They can condense recurring ideas, summarize related evidence, and give you a reusable narrative about the corpus.

They are useful when:

• a project is large enough that repeated chat is inefficient
• you need an orientation document for a topic area
• you want a reusable summary that can be reviewed and updated over time

Think of a knowledge page as a working handbook page generated from the corpus. It is convenient, but it still depends on the underlying sources being good.

Theme Analysis

Theme analysis tries to identify major themes or recurring ideas across the project. This is most helpful when:

• multiple documents discuss overlapping topics
• you want to see where the corpus agrees or diverges
• you are reviewing a corpus as a whole instead of answering one immediate question

Theme work is especially valuable for educators, librarians, and project owners because it helps expose the corpus structure itself.

Evidence Matrices

Evidence matrices are useful when the real task is comparison.

Examples:

• Which sources discuss discharge criteria?
• How do our documents differ on escalation thresholds?
• Which protocols mention dressing change timing?

A matrix format makes it easier to compare sources side by side instead of relying on a free-text synthesis alone.

How To Read These Surfaces Safely

Apply the same discipline you would use when reading a review article:

• Ask which sources contributed to the view
• Check whether the underlying documents are current and authoritative
• Watch for over-compression of nuance
• Open the original source when the point matters clinically or operationally

These tools are strongest when they make source review faster, not when they tempt you to skip it.

Common Misunderstandings

When Knowledge Surfaces Are More Useful Than Chat

Prefer them when you are:

• curating or auditing a project
• teaching from a corpus
• comparing multiple sources across a shared topic
• trying to understand why the project feels internally inconsistent
• preparing to expand or restructure a corpus

Prefer chat when you want a direct answer to one well-scoped question.

One Good Habit

Whenever a knowledge surface shows you something important, confirm it by opening at least one original source that contributed to that pattern. This keeps the evidence chain intact and prevents attractive visual summaries from outrunning the underlying corpus quality.