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andy 3de6e53ab0 chore: initialise Noema repository

Foundation for the persistent, inspectable cognitive runtime: README,
implementation plan with phases and risk register, architecture,
security model, threat model, contributing guide, eight ADRs covering
the global workspace, event immutability, memory representation, LLM
abstraction, capability system, authentication, frontend and storage.
Includes Makefile, env example, compose stack (pgvector) and Dockerfile
skeleton, plus a record of the development environment assumptions.

2026-06-12 19:56:53 +01:00

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ADR-0003: Memory representation

Date: 2026-09-14
Status: Accepted

Context

Noema needs episodic, semantic, procedural and autobiographical memory, working memory, decay without deletion, several retrieval mechanisms, provenance and relationships, and must not collapse epistemic categories.

Decision

One memories table with a kind discriminator and shared columns (importance, salience, activation, retrieval stats, source, credibility, epistemic kind, timestamps) plus a typed content JSON document per kind. Go exposes distinct types; the shared table keeps relationships, search and retrieval uniform.
epistemic_kind is a separate enum (observation, fact, memory, claim, hypothesis, belief, prediction, assumption, inference, opinion) present on memories, beliefs and evidence links.
Full-text search via a generated tsvector column. Embeddings live in memory_embeddings(memory_id, model, dims, embedding) created only if pgvector is available, so representations from different models are never mixed.
Relationships live in memory_relationships and the general entity_relationships graph with confidence, provenance and timestamps.
Decay is a scheduled deterministic update of activation; rows are never deleted by decay.
Working memory is an in-process bounded structure persisted in workspace_states after each cycle.

Consequences

Retrieval is a deterministic fusion of text, vector, recency, activation, importance and graph distance with per-component scores recorded.
Loss of the embedding service degrades retrieval quality but never availability.

Alternatives considered

Table per memory kind: cleaner typing but duplicated retrieval/relationship code and cross-kind queries become unions.
Vector-only store: rejected by requirement; loses provenance and structure.

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