“I wanted a tool to model the field of biodiversity and law enforcement within the biodiversity domain - with Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite, we could start right away, almost without help.”
Graphwise, Global - Empowering organisations to unlock knowledge and drive innovation with intelligent semantic and graph-based data solutions
Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite provides the semantic backbone behind Sensing Clues’ intelligent conservation tools. Through this collaboration, advanced knowledge management and intuitive field technology unite to transform complex biodiversity and law enforcement data into clear, actionable insights. The partnership has revolutionised nature conservation by enabling sophisticated taxonomy management and multilingual data collection through user-friendly applications — empowering field rangers and conservation teams worldwide to recognise patterns, anticipate threats, and protect wildlife with predictive intelligence.
The Challenge
The story of Sensing Clues began with a moment of realisation. While in a forest reserve in Laos, Founder and Director Jan-Kees Schakel was awakened by the sound of a gunshot in the night — a stark reminder of the ongoing threat of illegal poaching. It became clear to him that tackling wildlife crime required a professional, data-driven approach.
Conservation organisations across the world face a persistent technology gap. They need powerful yet practical tools to track, analyse, and respond to threats such as poaching and habitat loss. Many existing solutions, however, are either too complex for use in the field or lack the semantic intelligence needed to turn raw data into meaningful insight. Frontline conservation teams require tools that:
Manage the complexity of biodiversity and law enforcement data.
Are intuitive enough for rangers with varying technical experience.
Support multilingual operations and different naming conventions — from scientific to local field terms.
Provide contextual modelling that connects wildlife observations, human activities, and environmental factors.
Above all, the technology needed to be pragmatic, familiar, and field-ready — designed for rangers on patrol, not just analysts in offices.
The Solution
To meet this challenge, Sensing Clues integrated Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite at the heart of its Sensing Clues Tool Suite — a collection of interconnected applications designed for real-world conservation intelligence:
Cluey – a field data collection app
Focus 360 – a real-time situational awareness platform
Analytical Toolbox – a suite of tools for advanced analysis and predictive modelling
Within Cluey, the Thesaurus Manager from Graphwise powers the use of controlled vocabularies, synonyms, multilingual labels, and contextual modelling. Developers can easily build taxonomies that represent field actions, wildlife species, and environmental features — all in terms that are instantly recognisable to rangers. For example, rather than treating "Lion" as a single word, the system models it as a concept: Lion = Lion, Leão, Lioness, King, Panthera leo, and part of its taxonomic order. This semantic richness allows rangers to record observations naturally, while ensuring that the data connects meaningfully with scientific classifications and analytical systems.
Using the Ontology Manager, Sensing Clues can express relationships between actions, species, and events. When a ranger records that a lion was scared away from a nearby village, that information becomes part of a larger, structured data network. This data flows directly into Focus 360 and the Analytical Toolbox, producing predictive risk maps that help anticipate illegal activities.
The Impact
Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite provided the advanced taxonomy management tools required to meet the complex demands of conservation work, while remaining intuitive enough for training volunteers ranging from data scientists and software engineers to biologists. As Jan-Kees explained, "I wanted a tool to model the field of biodiversity and law enforcement within the biodiversity domain — with Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite, we could start right away, almost without help." It enabled Sensing Clues to begin foundational modelling for their taxonomies, with volunteers easily contributing their programming expertise without the need for extensive training.
The semantic concepts bridge the gap between users’ everyday language and scientific naming conventions through synonyms and multilingual labels. Additional contextual relationship modelling, powered by ontologies and knowledge graphs, allows ranger teams to interpret connections between thesaurus concepts and identify patterns within data. The taxonomy and ontology features within Thesaurus Manager form the backbone of the user-friendly applications that Sensing Clues provides to field organisations.
Looking Ahead
Sensing Clues continues building on their data visualisation tools by making use of knowledge graphs in the Graphwise’s Knowledge Management Suite, working on intuitive graph visualisations that help field rangers spot data patterns while maintaining their key principle of intuitive usability. Because smarter data means smarter conservation — and every clue counts.