The Knowledge Atlas is an interface prototype for the exploration of knowledge resources being designed and developed by Marco Quaggiotto at the Politecnico di Milano. The project takes advantage of the experience developed by cartography in the representation of complex and open spaces, historically able to hold heterogeneous, natural and social elements together in the same picture.

The interface becomes therefore an atlas of knowledge cartographies, designed to show a complex environment through the overlapping of different images. The concept of ‘Atlas’ in this context doesn’t depict as much a list of maps, but rather a system of representations of space, a communication device aimed at representing complex contexts through the use of many partial overlapping narrations. A tool combining multiple images in order to enable the user to act on space: navigate, describe, explore, change scale, shift focus.