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Atlas is easiest to understand by starting with what you need to do. You may be trying to learn who is doing good work in a place, turn that research into a team artifact, or build an integration on top of the same source-linked data. Every path below starts from the same premise: Atlas should help you find real people and organizations, inspect why the record is credible, and act without losing the sources behind the claim.

Public users

Search the public directory, open profiles, inspect source evidence, and understand who is working on an issue in a place.

Civic teams

Save actors, create briefs, track coverage, watch for changes, and export proof for a nonprofit, newsroom, funder, or research team.

Developers and agents

Use the API, MCP server, Scout CLI, OpenAPI contract, or self-hosted deployment to build on Atlas.

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If you want to understand a place

Start with the public directory. Search for a place and issue, open a result, and read the sources before you decide whether the record is useful.
1

Search a place and issue

Use Browse Atlas to search for a place such as Detroit and an issue such as housing affordability.
2

Open a profile

Look for the profile header, issue tags, location, source count, and source panel. A useful profile should make it clear what Atlas knows and where that knowledge came from.
3

Inspect the evidence

Read the source title, publication, date, URL, and excerpt before you act on the record. The trust guide explains how to interpret partial, stale, and single-source evidence.

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If you are working as a team

Teams usually need a path from discovery to a decision artifact. Atlas workspaces are for that handoff: source-backed profiles become lists, briefs, coverage targets, watches, and exports.

Build a source-linked briefing

Follow the Phoenix nonprofit walkthrough from public discovery to a reusable brief, coverage review, and evidence export.

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If you are building with Atlas

Developers and agents should use the human guides to understand the model, then use the generated reference for exact request and response shapes.

Use the API

Find organizations working on transit in Nevada and inspect their sources.

Run Scout and sync results

Run discovery locally, sync the run to Atlas, and open the resulting workspace run.

Connect an AI assistant

Use Atlas through Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Codex, or another MCP client.

Self-host Atlas

Deploy the app, API, docs proxy, OpenAPI route, and persistent storage.

Trust and provenance

The most important page if you need to understand what Atlas claims, what it does not claim, and how corrections work.

How Atlas works

The discovery pipeline explained without requiring backend knowledge.