The Civsy-project of Mimeta transforms fragmented reports of artistic censorship into a unified, searchable, and trustworthy source of information, Built on Vespa Cloud
Following text is from the Vespa Case Study

Civsy Highlights – Takeaways for Every Data-Driven Organization

Building Trustworthy AI Search for Human Rights
Censorship of artistic expression strikes at the core of open societies. When creative voices are silenced or suppressed, public discourse weakens, rights are eroded, and cultural records become distorted. Accurate documentation of these violations is essential — without it, advocacy loses direction, and hidden patterns of repression remain invisible.

Civsy is an AI-powered platform that monitors, analyzes, and reports violations of artistic freedom worldwide. Developed by Mimeta, a Norwegian organization founded in 2006 to promote cultural rights and free creative expression, Civsy aggregates data from researchers, NGOs, and public sources into a single, transparent, reliable system. Built on Vespa Cloud, it empowers users to expose and understand censorship in real time.

The Challenge: Fragmented, Unverified, Inaccessible Data

Before Civsy, information on artistic censorship was scattered across local reports, media stories, and word-of-mouth accounts. Researchers and advocates faced three persistent problems:

Fragmentation — No unified way to compare incidents across countries, art forms, or time periods.
Verification — Inconsistent or unverifiable sources undermined credibility.
Accessibility — Lack of searchable, analyzable data make timely response nearly impossible.

The result was an information vacuum: patterns of repression stayed hidden, and isolated cases failed to reveal the broader reality. Civsy was conceived to close that gap, bringing order, structure, and visibility to data that once lived in silos.

The Solution: Vespa-Powered Hybrid AI Search
Civsy is powered by Vespa Cloud, the AI Search Platform used by some of the world’s most demanding data applications. Vespa provides the intelligence layer that transforms unstructured reports, interviews, and field submissions into contextual, explainable, and searchable insights.

Within Civsy, structured attributes such as country, art form, or restriction type are seamlessly combined with unstructured text and media, allowing users to explore the full complexity of censorship cases through a single, unified search experience.

When a researcher searches for “book bans in North Africa” or “arrests linked to music performances,” Vespa’s hybrid retrieval engine goes beyond keyword matching. It blends keyword and vector search to uncover both exact and conceptually related results, even when the underlying material appears in different languages or translations.

As users interact with Civsy, Vespa’s ranking and personalization continuously adapt. Analysts following a particular region or theme see results that grow more relevant over time as the system learns from usage patterns, automatically reducing noise and highlighting high-value insights. The same intelligence also powers Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enabling Civsy to generate concise AI summaries that remain fully transparent — each linked directly to its verified sources.

Finally, Vespa’s conversational and multilingual capabilities make research feel natural and inclusive. Users can refine queries step by step without losing context, and cross-lingual embeddings ensure that an English search for “film censorship” can surface verified Arabic reports. Together, these features give Civsy’s audience a trustworthy, context-rich, and fluid way to understand the global landscape of artistic freedom.

Civsy’s credibility comes from its network of local researchers and reporting partners. Working within their own cultural and political contexts, these contributors feed the system with verified, structured, and timestamped reports. Vespa indexes and ranks them in real time, ensuring the platform evolves continuously. This blend of human expertise and machine intelligence makes Civsy both technically advanced and deeply human-aware — a living observatory for artistic freedom where accuracy, transparency, and empathy coexist.