Durable meaning lives in validated canonical records. Force positions, cameras, clusters, GPU resources and other renderer details are derived and replaceable.
Public · Relational knowledge system
Lūm
A local-first environment that keeps time, place, relationships, evidence, provenance and stories connected in one canonical continuum, then projects that continuum as timeline, world, map, dossier and narrative.
- Niche
- Relational knowledge with time, place, evidence and provenance
- Core stack
- TypeScript · Vite 8 · Lit · deck.gl/luma.gl
- Model
- Canonical continuum · occurrences · places · evidence · stories
- Focus
- Stable identity · coordinated projections · provenance
System view
Events · rangesCategoriesStoriesNarrative workspace
The study
Lūm began as a timeline, but the deeper problem was keeping facts, relationships, places, evidence and interpretation connected.
Chronology remains an essential projection, but it is no longer the product model. The canonical continuum preserves entities, occurrences, places, evidence, provenance and stories so timeline, relational world, map and dossier views can read the same identity without duplicating it.
System structure
Chronology is a projection of knowledge, not its owner.
Events and ranges
Point facts and duration ranges retain distinct temporal semantics.
Categories as a lens
Classification lets a chronology be explored by theme while preserving the common temporal order.
Linked stories
A story selects and relates facts while preserving the source data as its own layer.
Responsive workspace
The same structure remains readable from a phone to a wide desktop view.
Product and interaction design
The product separates canonical knowledge from every view that presents it.
An entity keeps its identity while situated relationships appear as occurrences with time, place and evidence. Stories select and traverse those records without copying them or turning narrative into the source of truth.
Composition changes across narrow and wide screens, but semantics do not. Selection, focus and canonical identity survive movement between timeline, world, map, evidence and story.
Architecture lens
Lūm keeps canonical knowledge outside every renderer and coordinates fast and expensive views through explicit projections.
The continuum owns entities, relationships and occurrences, places, evidence and stories. The retained timeline scene and deck.gl WorldSurface consume projections of that model; high-frequency timeline motion uses a cheap preview path and only meaningful commits wake more expensive filtering or layout.
Preview during pan and zoom preserves immediate response; committed events bound when the world, graph or more expensive analysis should recalculate.
Every visible instance resolves to canonical identity and occurrence. Node dragging, camera movement, clustering and force layout cannot rewrite geographic or temporal evidence.
deck.gl owns World camera momentum while the D3 simulation runs on a bounded, refresh-independent solver clock. Avoiding duplicate inertia loops reduces jumps and conflicts between interaction physics and layout.
Development approach
The design process alternates between two views of the same material: strict chronology and the story a person is trying to tell with it.
Experiments begin with real event, range, category and story combinations, together with deliberately constrained screen sizes. Visual ideas enter the shared model when they clarify interpretation and preserve the underlying facts.
Narrative experiments run against working data from the start. Validation and publishing checks preserve factual structure while the presentation continues to evolve.