Concepts

Memory

The memory is what Middleout knows about your business and what you can still teach it. It is organized as a knowledge graph: each piece is an object, and objects relate to each other.

The main object types are:

Type	What it is
Metric	A number the business tracks, with its formula and the tables it comes from.
Definition	A business word with an agreed definition.
Decision	Something someone decided: the question, what was chosen, the alternatives and the assumptions.
Rule	An agreed way of doing or interpreting something.
Procedure	Steps that repeat.
Learning	Something discovered while working with the data.
Mental model	How someone explains the causes of something that happens in the business.
Table	A table from a data source, with the description of its columns.
Document	A document from a source, such as a Drive file or a file in a repository.

Concepts, graph, corrections and proposals

• Concepts: the business words with an agreed definition.
• Graph: every concept Middleout knows and how they relate.
• Corrections: when two people or two sources say different things about the same thing, Middleout does not pick one on its own. It shows both versions and a person decides which one holds.
• Proposals: relations someone proposed, which can be confirmed or dismissed. What is confirmed weighs more when Middleout reasons.

Data

The sources you connect: databases, spreadsheets, folders, repositories and meetings. Middleout studies them and what it understands goes into the memory. See Connect your sources.

A source can be personal (only the person who connected it sees and queries it) or organization (shared, and also used by the work Middleout does on its own, such as alerts and scheduled updates).

Artifacts

What you produce working with Middleout. All three are connected to the figures they come from.

• Investigation: keeps a business question alive. It has an owner, hypotheses, evidence, the dashboards where it is tracked and a conclusion. It starts as something personal and can be published to the team or to the organization.
• Dashboard: you ask and save the answer; the figures update themselves. A dashboard can have pages and sections, and an authorized person can certify it as official for the organization.
• Presentation: what you show to others. Each slide points to a chart or a finding, so if a figure changes, it also changes in the presentation.

Alerts

Middleout watches the figures that matter and emails you when they break the rule you set for them, or when they return to normal.

Chat

The main entry point: you ask in natural language and Middleout answers with data from your sources, citing where each thing comes from. Investigations, dashboards and presentations start from the chat.

Organization, areas and roles

• Organization: your company in Middleout. Each person acts within the organizations they are a member of.
• Organization roles: owner (whoever created it), admin (organizes people: creates teams and decides who is in them) and member.
• Teams and areas: group the people and the knowledge of each part of the company.
• Data steward: a person authorized to curate information; for example, to certify a dashboard as official.
• Area steward: curates the knowledge of an area. An area can have several stewards.

Each person, and each assistant connected on their behalf, sees only what their permissions allow them to see.