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About the project

EDOPS is under continuing development toward a v1.0 release planned for Spring, 2027. This page covers where v0.4 (September 2026) stands, what's changed since v0.3, and what's still ahead. For the full research framing — citations, worked examples, the complete argument — see the project summary in the repository's documentation/ folder. For the intellectual foundations behind Computing Place, EDOP, and CDOP, see Karl Grossner's posts at kgeographer.org.

Status

Three broad phases of work sit behind v0.4, each at a different point in its own arc:

  • Signature Design — operational. The signature schema, its variable selection, and its temporal/spatial architecture are in active use, but remain open to revision as review and use surface new requirements.
  • Data Characterization (CHAR) — closed. A systematic characterization of the signature datasets' distributional, spatial, and redundancy properties, undertaken before any correspondence testing. Its findings are a frozen deliverable.
  • Platform Implementation — operational. The query engine, variable catalog growth, similarity tooling, and the Sandbox/Workbench/Data Explorer web interfaces built on top of both.

Roadmap toward v1.0

Three phases of work lie ahead:

  • Signature extensions and refinement — a set of variables (coastality's ecological and human-accessibility modes, terrain navigability) awaiting expert review before inclusion.
  • Further correspondence evaluation — testing whether and where EDOPS signatures correspond to independently attested cultural and environmental phenomena. Substantial exploratory work has already started here using D-PLACE societies data. Future candidate resources include the Seshat Global History Databank data linked to the Cliopatria polities already in place and the Tracks of Yu Yellow River database.
  • Dashboard design and development — a new user-facing tool, the project's intended primary public interface, informed by and likely borrowing from Sandbox and Workbench. Once it exists, those two pages are expected to recede into eyes-only preview surfaces for developers and project members.

What changed, v0.3 → v0.4

  • This documentation site was added.
  • The interactive API docs moved to /api/schema.
  • The signature service now supports areal queries in addition to a single containing basin for a place — basin ring and buffer scope choices for settlements, or an arbitrary polygon (so far, only historical polities from the Cliopatria dataset)
  • Areal results are returned as distributions across their member basins, not averaged down to single values.
  • The former Lookup page was replaced by a two-part Sandbox: a Settlements interface and a Polities interface, both built on the areal query architecture above.
  • A new Workbench page was added, with correspondence-testing experiments that compare selected D-PLACE societies and World Heritage cities against their environmental signatures.
  • Data Explorer (formerly "Explorer") is unchanged — it remains the data Characterization phase's visual exhibit of the project dataset resources.
  • Sandbox gained a new Similarity panel — a threshold test across precipitation, temperature, and terrain lenses, with adjustable tolerances per variable. Results are a set of basins worldwide (possibly empty) that match a place's environment on a given lens.
  • Workbench's WH Cities panel gained ranked retrieval: for its small named corpus of World Heritage cities, results are ranked by environmental similarity or by textual similarity between Wikipedia-article language, rather than tested against a threshold.
  • See Similarity in EDOPS for how these mechanisms actually differ, and why.

Published findings

The EDA and ESDA characterization findings, the augmented variable codebook, and other research records referenced above live in the repository's documentation/ folder, alongside the project summary.