Signal Atlas

Signal Atlas is a hackathon demo for a global OSINT instability watchfloor. It ingests open RSS reporting, extracts instability-related signals, geolocates them with confidence scoring, and turns them into an interactive heatmap that helps analysts see where civil unrest or military instability may be intensifying.

What this tool does

• Pulls live RSS items from a curated catalog of international news, analysis, and official sources
• Pulls public Bluesky posts from targeted instability watch queries using the public AppView API
• Normalizes each item into a shared SourceItem shape with provenance and feed metadata
• Infers likely geography from article text and source hints, then rolls low-confidence results up to country level
• Classifies signals into civil unrest, military instability, and narrative-risk indicators
• Scores locations based on recency, severity, corroboration, and confidence
• Renders the results as an interactive globe or flat map with evidence bundles and next-step OSINT suggestions

Current scope

• Data sources: live RSS feeds and public Bluesky watch queries
• Active source mix: international news, official advisories, and conflict-analysis feeds
• Output: a browser-based watchfloor showing hotspots, score splits, evidence, and trend direction
• Current goal: help analysts decide where to focus deeper OSINT next

How it works

1. npm run refresh:rss fetches the live RSS catalog and writes a normalized cache to src/generated/rss-cache.json.
2. npm run refresh:bluesky collects public Bluesky posts for the watch catalog and writes src/generated/bluesky-cache.json.
3. npm run refresh:live runs both live refresh steps together.
4. npm run generate:data transforms the cached items into signal events and location scores.
5. npm run build regenerates the dataset and copies the static app into dist/.
6. npm run dev serves the app locally so the watchfloor can be viewed in a browser.

Run locally

npm run refresh:rss
npm run refresh:bluesky
npm run refresh:live
npm run build
npm run dev

Then open http://127.0.0.1:4173.

Scripts

• npm run refresh:rss fetches the live RSS catalog and snapshots normalized feed items into src/generated/rss-cache.json.
• npm run refresh:bluesky fetches public Bluesky watch results into src/generated/bluesky-cache.json.
• npm run refresh:live refreshes both RSS and BlueSky caches in sequence.
• npm run generate:data regenerates the dataset from any live RSS and Bluesky caches when present, otherwise it falls back to seeded demo SourceItem records.
• npm run build regenerates data and copies the app into dist/.
• npm run build:live refreshes both live caches, then rebuilds the app.
• npm test runs the geolocation, signal-classification, and hotspot-scoring tests.
• npm run dev serves the repo locally on port 4173.

Current limitations

• Geography is heuristic and backed by a small built-in gazetteer
• Signal classification is still taxonomy and keyword driven
• Bluesky coverage is targeted watch-query collection, not full-network firehose coverage