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Jun 25, 2026

Heratio Help Center article. Category: Open Data.

Graph Explorer

Version: 1.0 Date: 2026-06-11 Author: The Archive and Heritage Group (Pty) Ltd

1. Overview

The Graph Explorer is a public, no-login way to navigate your collection as a connected graph. Instead of reading one record in isolation, a visitor can follow the links between records, the people and organisations they involve, the places they describe, and the subjects they are about - one hop at a time.

It is the human-friendly companion to Heratio's linked-data identity endpoints (/id/...). Those endpoints publish every record, agent and concept as machine-readable linked data; the Graph Explorer lets a person walk exactly the same graph in a browser.

Everything in the explorer is public, read-only, and covers published records only. No API key is required.

2. Starting out

Open /graph-explorer. The landing page offers two ways in:

  • Search - type a few letters of a record title, a person or organisation name, or a subject / place / genre. Matching entities are listed with a small badge showing whether each is a record, an agent, or a concept.
  • Starting points - a short list of the most richly-connected records, so you always have somewhere to begin even if you do not know what to search for.

Select any result to open its entity page.

3. Walking the graph

Each entity page shows:

  • The entity's label and a few key facts (for a record: dates, level of description, reference code; for an agent: dates of existence and type; for a concept: its kind).
  • Its connections, grouped into plain-language categories:
    • For a record: People and organisations, Subjects, Places, Repository, and Related records (the parent it is part of and the children it contains).
    • For an agent (person, family, or corporate body): the Records it is linked to.
    • For a concept (subject, place, or genre / form): its Broader term, its Narrower terms, and the Records tagged with it.

Every connection that resolves to another published entity is a link. Select it to move to that entity's page and keep exploring. A connection that has no public page of its own is shown as plain text, so you always see the full picture without ever hitting a broken link.

If an entity has no recorded connections yet, the page says so calmly - as the collection grows and is linked, related entities will appear.

4. Linking out

Every entity page also links outward, so the explorer is a hub rather than a silo:

  • View the full record / authority record / browse with this term - takes you to the canonical human page for the entity (the record page, the authority record, or a filtered browse for a concept).
  • Linked data (/id/...) - the machine-readable description of the same entity, available as JSON-LD, Turtle, or RDF/XML through content negotiation. This is what aggregators, researchers and linked-data clients consume.

5. Notes

  • The explorer never exposes unpublished or draft records. An address that does not match a published entity returns a friendly "not found" page.
  • All links are built relative to your own site address, so the explorer works correctly on any domain without configuration.
  • The Graph Explorer is part of Heratio's Open Memory Protocol. See also the Open data and APIs hub (/open-data) for the full set of machine surfaces (linked-data graph, bulk dataset dumps, OAI-PMH, the VoID discovery document, and more).