I wouldn't say a direct connection between those things is "obvious". Seems like you could just as easily argue that they are "obviously" indirectly related (ex. COVID-19 would effect social distancing, which would effect population density, which would effect real estate and housing).

But I agreed that the "nodes" I just made up are arbitrary, and that you could make an argument that everything effects everything else in some way. So it's not clear to me what gets to be a node and what constitutes an edge.

A noble effort, I'm all for exploring it, but it seems like pie in the sky.

Our technical documentation details what constitutes a node and edge ICYI: https://docs.system.com/system/

In brief, System is designed to maximize precision in how evidence is captured and represented, while also ensuring that information about the same or similar things is grouped together. This is key to building and representing one system. This translates into three types of nodes of increasing specificity: Topics, Metrics, and Features. More here: https://docs.system.com/system/using-system/topics-metrics-a....

Edges are statistical relationships backed by statistical evidence that meets certain criteria for significance, strength, and reproducibility. More here: https://docs.system.com/system/using-system/investigating-re....

Search results are not necessarily comprehensive — but they will be. System is in the early stages of its development as a public resource and you should expect that knowledge will be missing (just like the early days of Wikipedia and Google). The knowledge base will also be constantly growing and improving and evolving as knowledge does. ICYI, you can join our slack community to discuss this work further (the link is on system.com).

Why not mine the data from Wikipedia?

There is great work out there that mines Wikipedia for semantic relationship (co-occurrence of topics for example, parent-child relationships, etc.). But that methodology would not provide the statistical evidence that is the building block of System. Relationships on System are statistical in nature. A predicts B, C is caused by D, E and F are highly correlated, G and H change together, etc. By organizing these (billions and billions of) statistical relationships, anyone will be able see anything that's important to them as the system it truly is, rather than the silo we often see today.