There still is a long way to go to reach the goal of having mapped at least 35,000 topics for the PA Genome Project. Yet it appears that there is enough of a base (5000 topics, 14,000 variables, and 15,000 bivariate relationships) to develop a useful information and guidance system, which is called “COMPASS”. 

As the name suggests, COMPASS is intended as a steering assistance mechanism. The objective is to alert the public administrator to a broad range of strategy, external force, and impact considerations in a given situation. These considerations can be both internal to that administrator’s agency or office or outside of it.

As an example, a local government administrator may be concerned about communicating warnings to citizens in the vicinity of a hurricane-induced electricity outage. He/she may be thinking of a strategy involving a new communications system, say one to send a wireless message to all cell phones in the affected area. In addition to identifying some of the significant technical difficulties involved, COMPASS may alert the administrator to be aware that there may be some hesitancy about the strategy because it may be partially outside the locality's legal jurisdiction. There also might be lack of cooperation from administrators in nearby localities who might imagine themselves as being the recipient of additional response calls at a time when they already are extremely overloaded.

COMPASS thus can be used to search for strategies for a given problem and/or search for impacts for a given strategy, both under the influence of identified external forces.