Claims, witnesses & entities

Claim

A claim is the fundamental unit of knowledge: an atomic, source-locked, typed, timestamped statement of fact. Every claim carries:

• the statement text,
• a confidence score (0.0–1.0),
• the source span it was extracted from (so it can always be traced back),
• an extraction tier and an optional grounding score from the admission (rooting) phase.

Because a claim is locked to its source, "where did this come from?" always has a concrete answer. This is what makes grounded answers auditable.

Witness

A witness is a typed, content-addressed unit derived from primary bytes by a named rule from a fixed catalog. A witness is identified by BLAKE3(rule ‖ canonical_spans), which means the same bytes processed by the same rule produce the same witness — so knowledge dedupes across packs and workspaces automatically.

Witnesses are the evidentiary substrate beneath claims: where a claim is the statement, the witness is the content-addressed proof it was derived from. In the Console and Playground, the witnesses behind an answer show up as witness chips.

Entity

An entity is a named thing in the graph — a person, system, concept, team, API, database, library, file, module, function, config, or organization. Each entity has a canonical name, a type, and a description, and is referenced by the claims that mention it.

Relation

A relation is a typed, directed edge between two entities, backed by the claims that evidence it and carrying a strength (0.0–1.0). Relation types include depends_on, owned_by, replaces, contradicts, implements, uses, contains, created_by, part_of, calls, configured_by, tested_by, and related_to.

Entities + relations are what turn a list of facts into a graph you can walk — e.g. "what depends on this service?" or "who owns this module?"

How they connect

witness  ──derived-from──▶  primary bytes (a source span)
  │
  └──evidences──▶  claim  ──mentions──▶  entity
                     │                     │
                     └──evidences──▶  relation (entity → entity)