Cortex

Cortex (sidebar ▸ Data) is your window into the knowledge graph: the place you browse it, build it out, ask it questions, and keep it healthy. This page is the hands-on guide to the view. For the model behind it — one graph, workspaces as lenses, the three depths — read The knowledge graph first; the deeper technical reference is Knowledge graph infrastructure.

The view has five tabs:

The header works across all tabs: a workspace pill showing the current selection, Export, Refresh, the root-config gear, a shared New workspace action, and live status lamps for the graph services.

Read the Overview

Start here when you want the state of the system at a glance. The Overview tab shows a status strip, an embedded "shape of knowledge" graph, a live activity feed, health lamps for the knowledge services, the distribution of entity types, and an enrichment gradient — how much of your corpus is structure-only, entity-enriched, or vectorized. It updates live as files land and agents work; nothing on it is a static count.

Browse the graph

The Workspaces tab is a three-column workbench:

• Left — the workspace tree and, below it, the folder tree of the selected workspace. The tree lists every workspace, including the graphs attached to context artifacts; a toolbar toggle hides those artifact graphs when you want a shorter list.
• Center — the graph canvas. Pan, zoom, and click nodes; folders, documents, and entities are color-coded, and node size tracks document size. Changes animate in live — save a file under documents/ and watch its node appear moments later, no re-index step.
• Right — the details panel for whatever you select: node metadata, a raw Markdown editor for document nodes (edit the file without leaving the graph), a typed "Related" rail of connected nodes, and the action buttons — Enrich, Ingest, Create Workspace, and Delete. Deleting a file-backed node moves the underlying file to the OS trash, because the graph always follows the filesystem.

The default selection is the root workspace (_root) — the automatic mirror of your documents/ tree.

The three depths in practice

You never set a depth label by hand — a workspace's badge is derived from what it actually contains: structure (folders and documents), entities (extracted concepts and relationships), or full (vector embeddings on top). In the view this plays out as:

• The root workspace renders structure-first. Flip its Entities toggle to reveal any entity layer it carries.
• A workspace with extracted entities renders them by default — documents, their entities, and the relationship edges in one picture.
• A full workspace renders the same entities picture (vectors are not drawable); "Full" shows on the badge, and semantic search becomes available in the Knowledge Base view.

Ask the graph

The Ask the graph box sits in the Workspaces tab toolbar. Type a plain question about the selected workspace — "what connects the video pipeline to the products engine?" — and it answers from a relevant subgraph of that workspace, in a floating results panel over the canvas. It works at every depth and does not require a key; agents have the same capability through their graph tools.

Create a workspace

Click New workspace in the header (or Create Workspace on a selected node). The dialog builds a workspace from one of three sources:

1. A subtree of the root graph — start from a folder node you selected.
2. A browsed folder — pick any folder on disk.
3. A preset union — combine predefined path sets.

Choose the kind, then the build depth — Structure only, Structure + Entities, or Full (Entities + Vectors). Structure is free and instant; entities cost only your agents' attention; full runs the embedding pipeline and pre-flights your Gemini key before it starts. Structure is a complete state — you can enrich or upgrade later, and the badge follows reality.

Ingest and enrich

Ingest registers documents into the selected workspace: nodes are created, folders linked, metadata recorded. No file content is sent to any model — ingest at the default depth is mechanical and free. Batch ingests run as jobs you can watch and cancel.

Enrich is the deliberate second step. Select a document — or multi-select several, or a folder to cover everything in it — and click Enrich. An agent reads the material and extracts entities, relationships, and a description and summary for each document; a progress strip tracks the run, and the document's status moves from pending to done. Enrichment doubles as discovery indexing: those descriptions and summaries are what topic search matches on. Cost: your own agent's reasoning, no external API.

Steer the root mirror

The root workspace maintains itself, so your job is scoping, not upkeep:

• The header gear opens the root configuration: which root paths are mirrored, which file extensions are included, excluded folders, and a per-file size cap. A prune action removes anything newly excluded from the graph.
• For quick scoping, the folder tree has an edit mode: tick the folders you want excluded directly in the tree and save — the exclusion list and the prune happen together.
• Sync now (on the Dashboard's root-graph card) forces a full reconcile after bulk file moves; the live sync engine handles the steady state on its own.

Keep the graph healthy

• Lint runs structural checks and offers fixes: orphaned documents and isolated folders can be fixed directly from the pane; stale entries, singleton entities, and cross-workspace duplicates are flagged for review. Documents you simply have not enriched yet are not findings — they are a to-enrich queue, and Lint knows the difference.
• Report computes a deterministic analysis — most-connected hub nodes, topic communities, cross-community surprises, reference cycles, gaps, and suggested questions — with no model calls and no changes to the graph.
• Activity is the graph's own history: ingests, enrichments, deletions, lint actions, in order. Click an entry's subject to jump to that node on the canvas.

Export

Export in the header writes the selected workspace to portable files — a JSON graph plus GraphML — into the kg_exports/ folder under your install root. That is the hand-off format for outside tooling.

If the graph goes dark

The graph runs on a local database — ArcadeDB, provisioned and run by the platform itself — managed from Settings ▸ Database and Dashboard ▸ Platform Health. If it is not running, Cortex shows honest offline overlays instead of data, and everything resumes when it is back; your documents are never affected. Backend modes and connection settings live in the configuration reference.

Where to go next

• Knowledge Base — the curation lens over the same graph
• Context Artifacts — attach a purpose-built graph to an agent's briefing
• Knowledge graph infrastructure — the operating reference