Core Concepts

CortexDB is built on a small set of ideas that fit together. Read these in order for the full model, or jump to what you need.

• The Five Memory Layers — Events → Episodes → Facts → Beliefs → Understanding. Only Events are not derived.
• Event Sourcing — the immutable event log is the source of truth; every other store is a rebuildable cache.
• Bi-temporal Model — two time axes: when something was true, and when CortexDB learned it.
• Scopes — the single hierarchical namespace primitive that carries ACLs, quotas, and audit.
• The Experience Envelope — one payload shape for every kind of ingest.
• Lifecycle & Async Writes — the six atomic operations and the SSE stream; writes are async by default.
• Authorization — PASETO tokens and the four-tier capability stack.
• Knowledge Graph — an entity graph emergent from Facts and Beliefs (opt-in).
• Hybrid Retrieval — BM25 + vectors + graph + rerank, fused with RRF.