Sartori Network Logo

Mapping the Semantic Field in Social Science and Law

Giovanni Sartori urged political scientists to take their vocabulary more seriously in order to build on one another’s ideas. His key insight was that we identify and compare concepts within semantic fields—maps of related ideas. Sartori.network brings this vision to life, offering an interactive platform to explore and connect concepts across the social sciences.

2,010
Concepts mapped
10
Ontologies integrated

Methodology

We follow a series of steps to create the semantic map:

1

Gather & Standardize

Gather and standardize a collection of ontologies from the social sciences.

2

Embed Concepts

Embed each concept into a 1024-dimensional numeric representation using Multilingual E5.

3

Project to 2D

Project the concept embeddings into a two-dimensional map using t-SNE.

4

Build Network

Connect the embeddings into a network using pairwise cosine similarity.

Who It’s For

🔬

Researchers

Discover how your concepts relate to established frameworks across multiple datasets. Find semantic neighbors and identify gaps in existing ontologies.

📊

Data Scientists

Leverage standardized ontologies for coding, classification, and analysis. Use the network to harmonize variables across different datasets.

🎓

Students & Educators

Explore the conceptual landscape of political science. Understand how key ideas connect and where different scholarly traditions converge or diverge.

A Project of the Concept Integration Lab

Sartori.network is developed and maintained by the Concept Integration Lab, which works to build tools and infrastructure for integrating conceptual frameworks across the social sciences. Our goal is to help researchers build on one another’s ideas by making the relationships between concepts visible and navigable.