Mapping the Policy Web: a semantic knowledge-graph tool for navigating Ireland's environmental governance

Ireland's environmental governance is delivered through a large and growing library of separate documents — national acts and plans, EU directives and regulations, sectoral strategies and international conventions. This brief introduces an interactive knowledge-graph tool that maps the semantic relationships across a corpus of 191 such documents, and explains what it shows, how policy audiences can use it, and — importantly — what it cannot tell them. Documents are segmented and embedded with a three-model ensemble; connection strength is calibrated against the corpus's own background similarity distribution. The central finding is the density of the resulting network: environmental governance in Ireland is deeply interconnected, and no document stands alone. The tool is a discovery and triage instrument for expert users, not a measure of policy coherence or legal consistency.