Glossary

Short definitions of the key Notarium terms. Each term links to the page where it's explained in full.

Storage and identity

file-first — the principle that the source of truth is the Markdown files themselves, on disk. The search index, the link graph, and everything derived can be rebuilt from the files; you can grab the folder and walk away at any time. More in File-first.

space — an isolated knowledge base with its own index, graph, search, tree, revision log, and member roster. Every user has a non-deletable personal space (on the agent-facing pages it's called the personal domain). More in Spaces and projects.

project — a lightweight, optional entity: a marked folder with a stable identity inside a space (the marker is a dot-file at the folder root). An agent addresses it by the handle space/slug. More in Spaces and projects.

notarium-id — a stable 12-character note identifier in the frontmatter. It survives moving and renaming the file, so links and history never break. More in Version history.

note class — a set of visibility and indexing policies derived from where the note is stored (not a free-form field): user-doc (user note, visible everywhere), agent-memory (agent memory, indexed and reachable via recall but hidden from user-facing surfaces), plus the internal attachment, derived, and profile. More in Note types.

Access and agents

principal — a generalized access subject: a person or an AI agent. One grant mechanism for all of them. More in Access model.

roles — membership in a space: reader (reads everything), writer (edits notes), owner (manages membership). More in Access model.

PAT (Personal Access Token) — a personal access token for agents, sent in the Authorization: Bearer … header. It carries a scope (read/write), optional space scoping, and an expiry. The secret is shown exactly once. More in Connecting an agent.

MCP gateway — the built-in POST /mcp endpoint through which an AI agent reads and writes the knowledge base using intent-oriented tools (rather than generic CRUD operations). An agent's edits are versioned, bounded by access, and signed with provenance. More in Agents and MCP.

intent tool — an MCP gateway tool that expresses an intent ("find," "create a note") rather than a low-level CRUD operation on storage. More in Intent tools.

Search

hybrid search — a fusion of three channels: lexical (full-text FTS/BM25, always on), semantic (vectors, enabled by a flag), and an optional graph boost. The results are combined by the RRF algorithm. More in Search.

RRF (Reciprocal Rank Fusion) — an algorithm that weights and fuses ranked lists (lexical + semantic + graph) into a single result set without a shared score scale. More in Search.

degradation — a capability falling back to a simpler variant when its dependencies aren't there: if the vector stack is off or unavailable, search keeps working over full text (FTS) — with no error, and the same result. More in Search setup.

Versions and provenance

revision log — the version history of notes in the metadata database (not git). A revision is a full snapshot of state; identical states are deduplicated by content. The log is keyed by notarium-id, so history survives move/rename. More in Version history.

provenance — the attribution of each revision: who made the edit and how — a specific person, a specific AI agent, or an external file editor. More in Version history.

Deployment

self-host — Notarium's deployment model: a single self-contained container (Node/Fastify, engine in-process, no external services). Privacy comes from owning the server and the files, not from end-to-end encryption. More in Self-host.