COMPASS ID exists to index what humanity’s research has and has not studied, so that scientists, funders, and institutions can direct limited effort where it will matter most.
Mission. COMPASS ID, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that uses AI to classify the world’s scientific literature against controlled, expert-authored vocabularies. We build a free, open-access map of what science knows and what it has not yet studied, and we make research gaps measurable so that knowledge, funding, and conservation effort reach the places and questions that need them most. We are a nonprofit because that map should be a shared public good, open to everyone, not a product sold to a few.
Millions of research papers record what we have learned about species, ecosystems, diseases, places, and the policies meant to protect them. But there is no index of that knowledge — no way to ask, across the whole record, where research is concentrated and where it is entirely absent. As a result, effort clusters on the well-studied while urgent, unstudied questions stay invisible.
That index is possible because of one trick: have AI read every paper and attach the same accurate, structured metadata to each one — what was studied, and where. Once every paper carries that same structure, the pile of literature becomes a database. It can be queried in plain language instead of just keyword-searched, and because location is one of the fields, it can be mapped — spatial discovery, seeing directly where research has and has not happened.
For biodiversity and conservation, the cost is real: species can go extinct before they are studied, and funders cannot easily see which gaps their investment would close. COMPASS ID makes “what has not been studied?” a question you can answer from the data.
A free, searchable, spatially-explicit map of the scientific literature. Papers are classified against a controlled codebook of 46 shared dimensions — species, region, method, threat, evidence stage, policy framework, and more — so researchers can search by meaning, align work to funding frameworks, and see where research exists and where it is missing.
Interactive, openly available case studies that apply the method to a whole family or domain — Apocynaceae (medicinal plants), the Brazil-nut family across the Amazon, global desertification and drylands, and the fungal kingdom. Each atlas shows where research is thick, where it is absent, and how it lines up against real-world need. Explore the atlases →
We publish our methods and measure our accuracy rather than assuming it. The entities we tag come from external references (IUCN, GBIF, MeSH), each tag cites a quote from the paper, and a separate model reviews each result. Our work has appeared in peer-reviewed venues including Environmental Research Letters and Ecological Informatics.
Researchers can create a COMPASS ID, bring in their work by DOI or ORCID, and see their own research footprint mapped across species, ecosystems, geographies, and policy frameworks — and how it connects to the wider field.
