In reading some articles about the Department of War, ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and the middle East, and other entities and actions related to the USA and its government, I found it getting hard to remember all sorts of abbreviations like ODNI, OSINT, AARO, and the who’s who like Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and exactly what their functions and relationships are. This project is intended to be a pilot into visualizing those organizations, and I aim to expand it to show the relationships of individuals who’ve worked across the US Gov and its contractors. Of course, I’d like to expand this to suit any kind of government or corporate structure, but this is a baby step.

Description

An app for comparing different visualizations of a hierarchy. Primarily for US Government with plans for expanding to other forms of organizations.

Inspiration

After some time working out this concept in my head, I realized I was trying to recreate an older website which I rediscovered thanks to AI search called ‘They Rule‘.

They Rule is a true work of art, “an interactive visualization of the interlocking directories of the largest US companies.” It shows relationships between board members at different major corporations and even government administrations.

Future Ideas

There is massive room for improvement – this was a weekend experiment with vibe coding, and I like how it’s turned out. But after reviewing They Rule again, I see many opportunities to make this more usable.

• Have the app pull its data from WikiData (or possibly scrape it periodically using an agent).
• Update the graphics to be easier to conceptualize.
• Add people and position nodes within the organization nodes.
• Copy some of the features from They Rule, such as the “Find Connections” tool.

Perhaps in another iteration, I’ll use some agentic features to scrape data and compile it into a database, because right now the data is statically coded in JSON.

Technologies Used

• D3 (JavaScript library for visualization tools)
• Cytoscape (JavaScript library for more visualization tools)
• OpenCode (vibe coding)
• ASP.NET / C# / Blazor WASM
• Jetbrains IDE
• Cloudways Hosting
• Subdomain DNS