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Memex & the graph

“Consider a future device… in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” — Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” 1945

We call it the graph — your personal knowledge store. We call it your memex, after Vannevar Bush’s 1945 vision. Everything is an entity. Entities connect through relationships. It all lives in a single portable SQLite file at ~/.agentos/data/agentos.db.

One file, one mind

Section titled “One file, one mind”

Your memex is a portable SQLite file — your entire mind in a .db file. Copy it, back it up, load it on another machine. This is not a metaphor. The graph really is one file. Credentials are encrypted in the same file (AES-256-GCM, key in macOS Keychain). Nuke the file and everything’s gone.

Because the file is portable, domain memex (astronomy, law, medicine) can be mounted read-only into agent simulations — plug in expertise like a CD-ROM. When AgentOS users connect to each other, their memex form a network — Licklider’s intergalactic network, but for knowledge graphs instead of terminals.

Everything is an entity

Section titled “Everything is an entity”
  • A YouTube channel is a community. A YouTube comment is a post. A transcript is a document.
  • A WhatsApp contact and an iMessage contact with the same phone number are the same person.
  • A skill that connects to a service is itself an entity. The system models itself.
  • If something exists and has properties and relationships, it belongs in your graph.

The graph is the foundation. Every feature we build — search, feeds, timelines, recommendations, agents — reads from the same graph. Get the graph right, and features compose naturally. Get it wrong, and everything built on top is a special case.

Shapes, not tables

Section titled “Shapes, not tables”

The graph has one entity table and one relationship table. Entity shape is carried by the entity itself, via a _type entity that describes which fields, relations, and display hints apply. The engine doesn’t know about task or message or person — it only knows that there’s an entity whose _type points to a shape.

This is what makes the engine generic. Adding a new entity type is a YAML file in docs/shapes/, not a Rust change. See the Ontology overview for the full shape system.

Content vs. storage

Section titled “Content vs. storage”

The NEPOMUK Semantic Desktop drew a distinction we borrow: content (the information itself) and storage (where it lives). A document in your graph can be backed by a local file, a GitHub repo, an API response, or all three simultaneously. The graph tracks the content; skills handle the storage.

This is why “local” and “remote” aren’t two different things in AgentOS. Our own roadmap specs on GitHub are live documents. A research paper cited in our vision is a document entity with a URL. The vision file on disk, the same file on GitHub, and the entity in your graph — one thing, three views. When AgentOS fetches the latest from a source, it’s not “downloading a file” — it’s refreshing an entity.

See also

Section titled “See also”