Blog

Thoughts on enterprise modeling, knowledge graphs, and digital transformation.

Literate Graphs: How metapad Runs Our workOS

2026-06-02
Dr. Oliver GraslDr. Oliver Grasl

transentis runs its own business on metapad. This post opens up two of our working models — a marketing model that holds our strategy, brands and content as a queryable graph, and a masterdata model that acts as a digital twin of the practice, with a real-time view of our sales, project and financial KPIs. A worked example of the workOS pattern, from the inside.

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A Second Brain on Metapad: A Zettelkasten TemplateYou Can Fork

2026-05-26
Dr. Oliver GraslDr. Oliver Grasl

Your notes are everywhere and nowhere — scattered across apps, folders and half-finished systems. We show why a knowledge graph makes a better second brain than a pile of documents, walk through metapad's features for personal knowledge management, and give you a Zettelkasten-style template you can fork and make your own.

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A Computational Knowledge Graph of Your Enterprise

2026-05-19
Dr. Oliver GraslDr. Oliver Grasl

Prospects keep trying to fit Metapad into a category it doesn't belong to. The clearest definition is sometimes the negation: Metapad is not a wiki, not a spreadsheet, not a whiteboard, not a static diagramming tool. What it is is a tool for building computational knowledge graphs — connected, living, queryable, conversable maps of an enterprise that you can talk to and watch grow as the conversation unfolds. The graph doesn't just describe your business — it runs it: at transentis we use these graphs for marketing, masterdata (our internal digital twin), CVs and project references, systems documentation, and — with our clients — their operating models. Websites, manuals, RFPs, and dashboards are projections of the same graph.

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How We Build Metapad with Metapad: Conversational Modelling as a Way of Working

2026-05-12
Dr. Oliver GraslDr. Oliver Grasl

Most conversations with an LLM end when the tab closes — and most of the thinking that happened in them goes with the tab. We use Metapad to fix this: every conversation becomes a typed graph the next conversation can read. This post walks through the loop we've settled into — conversation, metamodel, graph — and why it changes how the team thinks together.

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Building Metapad: An AI-First Engineering Story

2026-02-15
Dr. Oliver GraslDr. Oliver Grasl

We haven't written a single line of Metapad's code by hand. Every component, algorithm, WebSocket handler — generated by AI, guided by humans. Here's how the process actually works, and what it taught us about where engineering is going.

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Metamodels vs. Ontologies: Two Paths to Structured Knowledge

2026-02-15
Dr. Oliver GraslDr. Oliver Grasl

Are metamodels and ontologies different disciplines or the same idea in different vocabularies? More overlap than most people realize — but the differences matter. Metapad's choice: metamodeling as the interface, with ontology-grade expressiveness underneath.

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Model Before You Change: Why Enterprise Transformation Needs Digital Twins

2026-02-15
Dr. Oliver GraslDr. Oliver Grasl

60–70% of enterprise transformations fail to hit their objectives — not because the vision was wrong, but because no one truly understood the starting point. The fix: build a model first, then explore, design, and transform with confidence.

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Why Knowledge Graphs?

2026-02-15
Dr. Oliver GraslDr. Oliver Grasl

Spreadsheets flatten relationships, documents bury them, relational schemas freeze them. Knowledge graphs make connection itself first-class — and that's why they matter for AI, for complex enterprises, and for the questions strategy actually has to answer.

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