ConcepDAG

ConcepDAG is a tool to visualize dependencies between concepts. For each concept, create a JSON file which describes the concept itself and which lists out the concepts it depends on. ConcepDAG will take all these JSON files as input and create a static website (example).

ConcepDAG is inspired by Metacademy.

How to use it?

To use ConcepDAG, you must run python3 main.py with the right command-line arguments. You must specify 3 directories in the command-line:

• input_dir: Directory where you'll put all content.
• intermediate_dir: Directory to store intermediate output.
• output_dir: Directory where the static site will be generated.

input_dir can (but need not) contain the following files/directories:

• nodes: Directory which should contain all your JSON files.
• includes: Directory which contains Markdown/HTML/plain-text files. If you want to describe a concept in detail, you can either write about it in JSON files in nodes or you can do write about it in files in includes and refer them from the JSON files.
• config.json: File for configuring the static website. Here you can specify metadata about the website and add additional stylesheets and scripts.

All sub-directories are optional; but of course, you won't get any output if there's no input!

You can also specify a theme to use to generate the website. If you don't do that, the default theme will be used.

Example

I used ConcepDAG to create TheoremDep, a website to track dependencies between theorems.

You can view the input_dir for TheoremDep at its source repository: https://github.com/sharmaeklavya2/theoremdep-source

nodes JSON schema

Coming soon.

config.json schema

Coming soon.

How is ConcepDAG different from Metacademy?

Metacademy tracks prerequisites between 'concepts to learn' (to learn A, you must learn B). ConcepDAG is made with a more general prerequisite-tracking aim in mind.

The main difference is that ConcepDAG generates a static website, whereas Metacademy is a dynamic web application.

• Metacademy is slow. I'm disappointed by the speed of their servers. A static website can be faster.
• Deploying an instance of a dynamic website is either difficult or costly.
• Metacademy allows easy content updation. ConcepDAG can't do that (yet).

Freedom to use

© 2021 Eklavya Sharma

All code is licensed under the MIT license. This roughly means that you are free to use, modify and distribute this code.