GovernAI Research Atlas

Open-source platform unifying research papers, repositories and governance resources behind a single semantic vector index.

An open-source AI research platform built on behalf of GovernAI, unifying papers, repositories and governance resources into one semantic search experience. Semantic retrieval runs on ChromaDB vector search with Sentence-Transformer embeddings across OpenAlex and GitHub, ranked by a custom relevance score.

For: GovernAI
Status: Open source
Sources: OpenAlex · GitHub

What it had to solve

AI-governance research is split across incompatible shelves: papers live in academic indexes, implementations live in code hosts, and policy resources live somewhere else again. Keyword search across them fails twice over — the same idea is named differently in a paper and in a repository, and a keyword match cannot tell a central result from a passing mention. What is needed is retrieval by meaning, over everything, with a ranking that knows the difference.

The decisions that shaped it

One embedding space over several sources

Papers from OpenAlex and repositories from GitHub are embedded with Sentence-Transformers into a single vector space. That is what makes the search cross-source rather than federated: a query is compared against everything at once, so a paper and the code implementing it can surface together.

ChromaDB as the retrieval layer

ChromaDB stores and searches the embeddings. Nearest-neighbour retrieval over one index means the system answers by proximity of meaning, so a query phrased in policy language can still reach a result written in engineering language.

A custom relevance score on top

Raw vector similarity is necessary but not sufficient — it will happily return something that mentions the topic once. A custom relevance score re-ranks the retrieved set so that centrality to the query, not just proximity, decides the order.

FastAPI between the index and the interface

A FastAPI service fronts the index and a React client consumes it, which keeps embedding and ranking on the server where they can change without shipping a new front end.