Here's our launch announcement with the full answer: https://about.system.com/blog/announcing-the-public-beta-of-...
TL;DR Because the biggest challenges we face in the world — from COVID to climate change — are systemic, yet our data and knowledge are organized into silos. I believe this fundamental incongruity makes it impossible to think, plan, and act systemically. As a result, we are stifled in our ability to reliably predict outcomes, make decisions, mitigate risks, and improve the state of the world for everyone.
So, we built System. A new way to organize data and knowledge into systems based on the evolving relationships between everything in the world. A shared tool for systems thinking — and, we hope, a springboard for collective action.
We share much in common with Wikipedia, are deeply inspired by what it does for the world, and hope to be used alongside Wikipedia. Our openness and CC license, our use of Wikidata as the source of definitions, for example, are common. But System aims to explain how anything in the world relates to everything else — based on statistical evidence. It is not an encyclopedia.
We are building System with multiple personas in mind. While a domain expert might be interested in drilling down to understand the source of every piece of evidence, an average user may just want to understand the system of using pacifier for their newborn.
The atom of System is a single statistical association that carries its context (population, covariates, etc). As you zoom out, we summarize and combine pieces of evidence (through semantic matching and meta-analysis).
This method provides an incredibly powerful framework to tailor to different needs and level of expertise.
Is this a way of visualizing connections in a way that, for instance, Wikipedia cannot?