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Queries are how you ask Antlect questions, and the working surface of the Discovery Terminal. This guide covers composing a query, tuning it, and following its execution in the thread panel. Questions are interpreted through the Semantic Ontology Layer, which is why plain language works and why results include records that never used your wording.

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Composing a query

Start a new query from the thread panel inside any project. Write the question the way you’d ask a colleague:
Which research institutes in Australia have growing patent activity in battery chemistry, and who are their key people?
You don’t need special syntax: Antlect interprets the entities, geography, and intent from natural language.

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What makes a good query

  • Name the domain: “photonics”, “battery chemistry”, “mRNA delivery”, rather than a broad field like “science”.
  • Say what you want ranked: people, institutions, funders, so the answer is organised the way you’ll use it.
  • Include geography if it matters. Antlect’s coverage is deepest for New Zealand and Australia.

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Tuning a query

Before running, you can open the tuning controls to shape the analysis:
The primary entity type the answer is organised around. Choose People for a who’s-who, Institutions for a capability map, or Funding to follow the money.
How results are ranked: publication output, citation impact, funding volume, collaboration breadth. You can combine metrics; the Summary view explains how each entity scored.

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Watching a query run

Queries execute inside the thread panel, in place: you never leave the workspace. As the analysis proceeds you’ll see:
  1. Step trace: each stage of the analysis appears as it starts, with elapsed timing.
  2. Expandable steps: click a step to see what that stage examined.
  3. Completion: the thread card links to the full results view when done.
Past runs stay in the thread, so a project accumulates a visible history of how its answers were produced.

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Re-running and iterating

Queries are cheap to iterate. If the Summary shows the question was too broad, refine the wording or narrow the dimension and run again: each run is kept as its own entry in the thread, and nothing is overwritten.
Treat threads like a lab notebook: keep the exploratory runs. When a result is worth keeping, save its artifacts to the Library or a report rather than trying to reproduce it later.

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Next steps

Reading results

Navigate the Summary, Publications, and Patents views.

Network graph

See the same answer as a map of people and institutions.