Infrastructure Intelligence: the framework

Why a framework, not an article

Smoking Mirror’s infrastructure reporting will span many domains — energy, water, transport, telecom, data centers — that share a shape: geolocated assets, time-stamped disruptions, and the question of who is affected. Rather than rebuild that plumbing per story, Infrastructure Intelligence establishes it once. It mirrors the Wildfire Pulse and Cyber Intelligence architecture exactly: a scheduled ETL, immutable dated snapshots, a dashboard that replays any past day. A new investigation plugs in; it does not start over.

The source contract

Every data source is a class implementing three methods — the same contract across all Smoking Mirror engines. fetch() retrieves raw data (live, or a labeled fixture) and never raises, reporting a per-source status instead. normalize() maps the raw payload into the engine’s schema and is pure, so it is unit-testable against fixtures. metadata() describes the source for the archive manifest. Registering a source is one class plus one line.

The framework ships two sample sources demonstrating the two recurring patterns: point features (facilities with coordinates and attributes) and status events (advisories tied to those facilities). Most infrastructure feeds are one or the other.

The dashboard shell

The shell reads the engine’s snapshots and renders them generically — summary cards, a facility map, an active-advisory table, trend charts, and a date selector for historical replay. An investigation reuses the shell by pointing the engine’s output at it, and restyles only where its domain needs something the generic view lacks.

Roadmap

1. Phase 1 — shipped

   Framework

   ETL engine, source contract, immutable snapshots, dashboard shell, content templates — on sample data.

2. Phase 2

   First real investigation

   Swap the sample sources for a real infrastructure feed; the first story plugs into the shell.

3. Phase 3

   Multi-domain library

   Reusable connectors per sector (energy, water, transport, telecom) accumulate as investigations ship.

To build an investigation on this framework: copy this article’s folder, add your source class to the engine, register your bibliography, and point the engine’s output at a dashboard embed. The plumbing is done; the reporting is yours.