Concepts

Intercal models knowledge as cited temporal state, not as free-form summaries.

Source documents

A source document is an immutable evidence unit from an adapter-backed source. Source rows carry license and redistribution posture. Source documents snapshot that posture at ingest time so later policy edits do not silently rewrite what may be exposed.

Claims

A claim is an atomic factual assertion extracted from source evidence. Claims carry confidence, status, contradiction state, valid-world time, and transaction time. Public claim output must include citation paths or an explicit unavailable state.

Entities

Entities are conservative resolutions of mentions into canonical things: organizations, products, events, concepts, legislation, technical artifacts, datasets, jurisdictions, people, roles, and sources. False merges are corruption, so resolution is intentionally conservative.

Relationships

Relationships are typed temporal edges between entities. They are derived from claims and evidence, not invented by the UI. Relationship status and valid-time windows make point-in-time reads possible.

Fact versions

Fact versions are append-only bitemporal records. They let Intercal answer both "what was true in the world at this date?" and "what had Intercal recorded by this date?"

Digests

Digests are delivery artifacts, not canonical facts. get_delta produces token-budgeted cited summaries over already-recorded evidence and graph state. The digest does not become the source of truth.