The middle tile is the home base tile which contains information about your buildings, the amount they generate, how many buildings you have, etc. For each building on the left side is the artifact slot where you can select an artifact to boost resource production.
Artifacts drop from dungeons, which have a 5% chance to spawn on a tile.
Clicking on a normal tile will bring up the build menu which contains the buildings you can build on the left side, the cost of the building in the middle bottom of the window and information of the selected tile's biome bonuses on the right side. You can find that information by surveying the tile. Surveying will also explore the adjacent tiles, building will do the same.
Some buildings require other resources to function properly. In the build menu, in the middle is the description which contains which building requires what resource to work. If a resource reaches 0 all buildings that need that resource will be paused and you need to start them manually.
You can level up buildings or improve their efficiency from the building info window which will show up when you click on a machine.
A bit of a long explanation, but I tried to keep it as short as possible. ;)
Have fun.