Skip to content

🌐 Policy Atlas

Policy Atlas is a web application designed to streamline policy evidence exploration. The app will help policy analysts and researchers to search and synthesise policy evidence, and simulate policy interventions.

This technical documentation will help you understand, set up, and contribute to our AI-powered policy design platform.

⚠️ This is a work-in-progress and subject to substantial changes in the next few months!

Tech Stack

We are using Next.js for frontend (a framework based on javascript) and Python for backend. We're still early in development (validating the concept) and hence this might change over time.

Frontend

  • Next.js 15 - React framework with App Router
  • React 19 - UI library
  • TypeScript - Type safety
  • Tailwind CSS - Utility-first CSS framework
  • Clerk - Authentication and user management
  • shadcn/ui + Ant Design - UI component libraries
  • Zustand - Client-side state management

Backend

  • FastAPI - Python web framework
  • uv - Python package manager
  • OpenAlex API - Academic paper database
  • Overton API - Grey literature database

Project Structure

discovery_policy_atlas/
├── backend/                   # FastAPI Python backend
│   ├── alembic/               # Database migrations
│   ├── app/
│   │   ├── api/               # API routes and endpoints
│   │   ├── core/              # Core configuration and models
│   │   ├── models/            # Database models
│   │   ├── services/          # Business logic and external integrations
│   │   └── utils/             # Utility functions
│   ├── main.py                # Application entry point
│   └── pyproject.toml         # Python dependencies
│
├── frontend/                  # Next.js React frontend
│   ├── app/                   # Next.js App Router pages
│   ├── components/            # Reusable React components
│   ├── lib/                   # Frontend utilities and API client
│   ├── types/                 # TypeScript type definitions
│   └── package.json           # Node.js dependencies
│
├── docs/                      # Technical documentation
│
└── Configuration files
    ├── docker-compose.yml     # Container orchestration (for databases)
    ├── mkdocs.yml             # Documentation site config
    └── railway.toml           # Deployment configuration (not used?)