memex
A memex — a portable knowledge graph. Named for Vannevar Bush’s 1945 vision of a personal knowledge store with associative trails.
A memex is a SQLite database file containing entities, relationships, and trails. It’s the “disk image” to a simulation’s “VM” — persistent knowledge that can be loaded, forked, snapshotted, and shared.
Types: personal (your mind), domain (expertise), snapshot (point-in-time), fork (experimental copy), community (published for others).
Plural is “memex” (same word, like aircraft or fish).
Examples: joe.db (personal), astronomy.db (domain), spacex-history.db (community)
| Metadata | Value |
|---|---|
| Plural | memex |
| Subtitle field | description |
Fields
Section titled “Fields”| Field | Type |
|---|---|
description | text |
origin | string |
filePath | string |
nodeCount | integer |
edgeCount | integer |
fileSize | string |
snapshotOf | datetime |
published | boolean |
Relations
Section titled “Relations”| Relation | Target |
|---|---|
owner | person |
forkedFrom | memex |
snapshots | memex[] |
Prior art
Section titled “Prior art”External standards this shape draws from or aligns with. See Shape design principles for how prior art informs shape design.
- Vannevar Bush — “As We May Think” (1945) — The original concept. Our memex is named after and modeled on Bush’s personal knowledge store with associative trails.
- W3C RDF 1.1 + Named Graphs — Formal underpinning. Our nodeCount/edgeCount mirror RDF subject-predicate-object triples; snapshots ≈ named-graph versioning.
- Roam Research / Obsidian / Logseq PKM model — Practical modern precedents. Our origin values (personal, domain, fork) generalize the single-user PKM model to shareable graphs.