05 — How an engagement runs

A joint team of your specialists and ours, working on the enquiries your institution could not answer.

We start narrow and deliberately: one exhibition question, reference enquiry or provenance investigation that a specialist genuinely tried and abandoned. Your people are in every session, not briefed afterwards. Durations are the typical shape and are scoped per institution.

PHASE 0 PHASE 1 PHASE 2 PHASE 3 Alignment Ontology design Graph & first enquiry Capability transfer a knowledge map an ontology you authored a real, evidenced answer your team, working alone OUR INVOLVEMENT, DESIGNED TO DECREASE — YOUR TEAM'S, TO INCREASE
PHASE 0

Alignment

Your leadership and our team choose the enquiry worth answering first — usually one that crosses two or three departments and has defeated everyone who tried it.

Your team leaves with

A knowledge map: what the institution holds, what it doesn't, and where the gap is costing you.

PHASE 1

Mission-driven ontology design

Working sessions where your specialists make explicit what has always been implicit, and settle terminology departments have quietly disagreed on for decades.

Your team leaves with

An ontology your institution authored and owns, aligned to your existing vocabularies, plus the governance to keep it alive.

PHASE 2

Graph & first enquiry

Our engineers pair with your systems staff to build the graph, connect the records that feed it, and answer the Phase 0 enquiry on top of it.

Your team leaves with

A real answer with its evidence trail attached, and the know-how behind every design decision in it.

PHASE 3

Capability transfer

Your team takes the next collection the whole way with us watching, then does the one after that alone. New collections attach to what exists rather than replacing it.

Your team leaves with

A knowledge management capability of your own — not a dependency on an outside firm.

How you know it worked: your team models the next collection without us. That's the deliverable — the graph is only the evidence that the capability transferred.

What changes for the institution

Today
With a knowledge layer
An enquiry is answered by whoever happens to know
Answered from the record, with the research trail attached
A curator can only search what they can hold in their head
The collection proposes what's relevant, across every department
Departments catalogue in vocabularies that don't reconcile
One model the whole institution shares, built from those vocabularies
The reasoning behind an attribution retires with its author
The argument is captured, not just the conclusion
Staff quietly paste collection material into public AI tools
A sanctioned path that keeps restricted material inside
Most of the collection can't participate in a visit
Stored objects contribute to routes, programmes and enquiries
Visitor questions evaporate at the end of each day
Unanswered questions accumulate as a ranked research agenda
08 — Start the conversation

If this is close to what you have been thinking, let's find a time.

90 minutes. Bring your curators or librarians, and one question your institution couldn't answer.

Received. We'll reply within two business days to find a time.

Or write directly — hello@neogens.co

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What we do together
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Reference implementation