Choosing a Workbench

A workbench is a top-level operational domain. Switching it reconfigures the whole application: which data is fetched, which sidebar tabs and panels appear, and which map layers render. It's the first decision you make in a session, because it determines which concepts are even relevant to what you're doing.

A good way to picture it: the workbench is like the mode dial on a camera. The camera body — lens, sensor, controls — stays the same, but flipping from portrait to sports mode changes what the whole machine is optimised for. In Krataxis the shared body is the engine underneath: collection, credibility scoring, battlespaces, the intel pipeline. Each workbench surfaces a different specialised toolset on top of it.

There are three.

At a glance

⚔️ Conflict Tracking — the default

Armed-conflict intelligence: events (strikes, clashes, manoeuvres), actors and their territory, military units, areas of interest, critical infrastructure, escalation signals, and fused open-source intel. This is the richest workbench and owns the most specialised machinery — actor territory hulls, standardised military symbology, escalation prediction, and deception detection.

Its sidebar carries the full tab set, plus panels for escalation, infrastructure, watchlists, collaboration, and the confidence matrix. If you do nothing, you're here. It's documented in the Conflict Tracking category.

🦠 Health & Disease

Epidemiological intelligence: disease outbreaks, individual patient cases, transmission chains, pathogens, exposure events, and computed epi metrics.

Two things to know before you start:

• Health data is outbreak-scoped. Most of it loads only once you select a specific outbreak — so pick an outbreak first, then work.
• The battlespace container doubles as the Outbreak container here. The header's battlespace button becomes the Outbreaks button, and choosing an outbreak is how you scope the picture. If you already understand battlespaces from the Conflict workbench, you understand outbreaks — same container, different label.

See the Health category.

🌋 Natural Disasters

Disaster intelligence: earthquakes, floods, wildfires, cyclones, and volcanic events, with impact-zone modelling. It deliberately shares the event and intel pipelines with Conflict but excludes conflict-specific layers — there are no units, actors, or hotspots here. Its tabs are pared down to Events, AOI, and Intel.

The result is a leaner cockpit: fewer tabs, less machinery, faster to read during a fast-moving response.

How to decide

Pick the domain that matches the thing you're tracking, not the region:

• Tracking forces, incidents, and who-did-what → Conflict.
• Tracking cases, spread, and exposure → Health.
• Tracking a hazard and who or what it threatens → Disaster.

If you're monitoring a single crisis that spans domains — say, a conflict with a humanitarian-health dimension — most analysts keep a battlespace in Conflict for the security picture and an outbreak in Health for the epidemiological one, and switch between them. The two containers can cover the same geography without interfering with each other.

Switching workbenches

The workbench switcher is the coloured pill in the centre of the header. Click it to open a dropdown listing all three domains with descriptions; the active one carries a ✓. Pick another and the workstation reconfigures immediately — panels reset and the relevant data reloads.

The active workbench is in the URL. It travels as a ?wb= parameter, so a link you copy carries your workbench choice. Anyone with access who opens that link lands in the same domain you were in — useful when sharing a view with a teammate.

Which one am I in?

Two quick tells: the colour of the switcher pill (red = Conflict, green = Health, amber = Disaster) and the set of tabs in the sidebar. If you can't find a tab you expect — say, Actors — you're probably in the wrong workbench for that task, not looking at a bug.

Where to next

• Battlespaces — the container that scopes your work within a workbench.
• The Conflict Workbench Overview — a deeper look at the default domain.