Landmarks
A landmark is the one point that stands for a region, the way the Eiffel Tower stands for Paris. Mantis picks it for you: no one writes a landmark, and there is nothing to place. Turn them on and each visible cluster grows a gold ring around its most representative point.
- Toggle
- Toolbar > Landmarks
- Shortcut
- l
- Available on
- Map
- Per cluster
- 1
Landmarks are not notes
A note is something you wrote and pinned to the map. A landmark is something Mantis found. They look different, live in different places, and neither one can become the other.
Turning them on
Press Landmarks in the tool island, directly under Note, or press
L. It sits among the tools but is not one: it turns the ringson and leaves your active tool alone, so Select stays Select. On a space that has never had landmarks generated the button is greyed out and the key does nothing — see Generating them.
It sits under Note because the two are counterparts: a note is the place you marked, a landmark is the place Mantis found. And it is an overlay rather than a coloring strategy, so it composes with everything else — you can ring landmarks while coloring by clusters, by a category, or by anything else.
What you see
A gold circle around the point, larger than the white selection ring and clearly a different color, so a landmark that is also selected shows both. The ring never covers the point itself — you can still see the dot inside it.
Rings follow the cluster hierarchy as you zoom, exactly the way cluster labels do. Zoomed out you see one landmark per broad region; zoom in and the coarse rings give way to the landmarks of the sub-regions inside them. This is the same depth the cluster labels are drawn at, so a ring and the label above it always describe the same region.
Click a ringed point and the Inspector shows a gold star beside its title and a Landmark card saying why that point is significant.
Showing the titles
Rings tell you a point matters without telling you what it is. Open Settings from the tool island and tick Show Landmark Labels to put each landmark’s title on the map permanently — the same label the map shows when you hover a point, in the same style and at the same Point title size, but it stays up.
Off by default, and greyed out until landmarks themselves are on. Titles that cannot fit are dropped rather than drawn over each other, so a crowded region labels the landmarks nearest the middle of the view and leaves the rest as bare rings; zoom in and the rest get their labels as the room appears. Hovering a labelled landmark does not draw a second copy of its title.
Bagging them
The Bags panel has a Landmarks button beside New bag. It needs no selection: it saves the landmarks the map is drawing right now as one bag, which is a ready-made representative sample of the space to summarize, chart or hand to an agent. What it captures follows the zoom, so bagging at an overview zoom gives you the broad regions and bagging further in gives you the finer ones.
How a landmark is chosen
Two stages. First every point is scored against its own cluster on five measures:
| Measure | What it asks |
|---|---|
| Centrality | Does this point genuinely belong to the region it would stand for? |
| Margin | Could a neighbouring region claim it just as well? |
| Distinctiveness | Does its vocabulary mark it out within the region? |
| Richness | Is there enough here to be worth reading? |
| Sparsity | Is it individually visible, or lost in a crowd of near-duplicates? |
The best handful per cluster then go to a language model, which picks the most emblematic one and writes the sentence you see in the Inspector. Where the statistics already point clearly at one point, the model is skipped and the Inspector shows a generic line instead — the ring is in the same place either way.
A measure that cannot be computed drops out and the rest are reweighted, so a space with no text or no high-dimensional embedding still gets landmarks from geometry alone. Clusters with fewer than three points are skipped: “the salient one of two” is not a claim worth drawing.
Generating them
When you create a space. Open Advanced processing settings on the creation form and tick Generate Landmarks under Labeling. It is off by default, because detection costs model calls.
For a space you already have. Open View > Machine Learning > Space Creation, stay on the Refine tab, choose Landmark Detection Phase, and click Invoke Phase. Like every other phase it runs in the background; use Show Logs to follow it. The rings appear on the map when it finishes, without a reload.
Limits
- Re-clustering clears them. Landmarks are attached to clusters, so re-running the Clustering, Dimensionality Reduction, or Re-Embed phase deletes them along with the old clusters. Run Landmark Detection again afterwards. Nothing regenerates them silently, so a re-cluster never bills you for model calls you did not ask for.
- One landmark per cluster, and no way to override the choice or nominate your own. For a point you want marked yourself, use a note.
- Landmark labels avoid colliding with each other, but not with cluster labels, which are laid out separately.
- Default map only. Map (Legacy) draws no rings.
- The significance line can be empty on clusters the model was not asked about; the Inspector then falls back to a generic description.