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Inspiration

AgentOS draws from decades of research in knowledge representation, personal information management, and human-computer interaction. We cite our influences because they deserve it, and because understanding where ideas come from is itself a graph.

The visionaries

Section titled “The visionaries”
  • Vannevar Bush — “As We May Think” (1945). The memex: a device for storing, linking, and traversing personal knowledge. Our memex concept — a portable SQLite knowledge graph — is his vision, built 80 years later.
  • J.C.R. Licklider — “Human-Computer Symbiosis” (1960), the “Intergalactic Computer Network” memo (1963). The foundational vision of humans and computers as partners. Our social layer — memex connecting to other memex — is named for his intergalactic network.
  • Doug Engelbart — “Augmenting Human Intellect” (1962), “The Mother of All Demos” (1968). Interactive computing, hypertext, shared screens. His “knowledge workshop” concept is what AgentOS simulations are.
  • Ted Nelson — coined “hypertext” and “hypermedia.” Project Xanadu: bidirectional links, transclusion, the dream of a universal document network. His “docuverse” anticipated the graph-as-world concept.
  • Alan Kay — Dynabook, Smalltalk. The computer as a medium for human expression.
  • Claude Shannon — information theory (1948). Proved that knowledge is measurable and transmittable. The namesake of Anthropic’s Claude.
  • Alan Turing — the Turing machine, computable numbers, “can machines think?” The theoretical foundation for everything.
  • Bret Victor — Inventing on Principle. Direct manipulation, immediate feedback, tools that match how humans think.

The ontologies

Section titled “The ontologies”
  • NEPOMUK — the Semantic Desktop. Content vs. storage separation, personal information ontologies.
  • Dublin Core — 15 essential metadata elements for describing any document. The library science foundation.
  • Schema.org — structured data vocabulary for the web. CreativeWork, Person, Organization.
  • ActivityStreams / ActivityPub — the fediverse protocol. Decentralized social data.
  • W3C PROV-O — provenance ontology. Why changes are first-class entities in our graph.

How this shows up in the code

Section titled “How this shows up in the code”

These aren’t credits in a footer. They’re architectural. The memex is the graph. The intergalactic network is how memex will connect to each other. PROV-O is why every change is an entity on the graph. Schema.org is where a lot of our shape naming comes from.

See Research for deeper dives on specific ontologies and platforms we’ve studied.