What's an Aspect in Coegil’s research platform?

• Adding structure to research can enhance both the readability and usability of the research as well as make it easier to find.
• Most other platforms have no structure or a rigid structure that doesn’t meet a researcher’s needs.
• Coegil places all tags within a simple ontology of forces, players, locales, and concepts, which is a free-form tag.

Coegil believes that adding structure to the research process and presentation of research can help both researchers and decision makers. Researchers can find their own information more easily when it comes time to update it. Decision makers can read and understand the content better and reference them when needed.  Coegil's machine-learning algorithms will find better matches and more connections with Aspects.

Coegil’s Aspects are a sophisticated tagging system that gives structure to research and makes it simple to categorize, file and reference that research. To understand an Aspect, we have to start at the beginning with understanding the structure of research projects and the role structure plays in the process.

The importance of structure in research

Before we get too deep into explaining the role of an aspect, let’s look at why you even want or need structure in your research projects. Here at Coegil, we believe that a meaningful and useful way to view the world is as a series of transactions. Think about how most parts of your life include exchanges of good or services. 

These goods and services are exchanged between players, such as individuals, companies or other entities, NGOs or governments. These players complete their transactions at various locales. Think economies, markets, countries, regions, neighborhoods for these various locales. Forces, such as economics, social and market, influence these transactions.

Players, locales, forces, and concepts allow you to paint a rich picture for your research - one that decision makers can quickly understand.

The problem with other research platforms

Other research platforms provide little to no structure, which leaves researchers and decision makers wasting time trying to reference previous research or guessing matches while searching.  Having just free-form space for research makes organization difficult, if not impossible.

Some platforms offer a tagging system that doesn’t adjust to meet your needs. This can be frustrating as not all research falls into one specific category easily.

Coegil’s research tagging called Aspects

We designed Coegil Aspects to serve two distinct purposes. The first is that they make it easy for you and others to find or filter your research. The second purpose is to make meaningful cognitive connections to your research easier.

Coegil asks that all tags fall within a simple ontology of players (e.g., individuals, companies or other entities, NGOs, governments), locales (e.g., economies, markets, countries, regions, neighborhoods) and forces (e.g., economics, social and market). We also have an Aspect called concepts that is free-form tags to allow you to tag the way you need to when working on different projects.

You can put all your tags under Concepts if you’d like. This would make for a solution like what other platforms offer. Or, you can use the other Aspect types of Players, Locales, and Forces to add richness and depth to your research tagging and structure.

Using Aspects helps our natural-language processing algorithms find better matches between your research and others. Using Aspects allows you to establish yourself as an expert in a unique research niche. Once you establish this unique research niche, others can recognize you for that and seek out your research.

So not only does Coegil’s structure for research make it simpler and easier to find, it also helps you showcase your research in a new way to bring on new clients and build new opportunities.

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