The world’s distributed knowledge graph
The Underlay's purpose is to make knowledge accessible, connectable, and inspectable in service of the public good. Like the web, it is an emergent system and concept. It is built on a set of open source protocols and tools for structuring, storing, and aggregating distributed graph data.
The Underlay Project is a team of people developing protocols and tools that enable the Underlay to exist. The protocols are expected to have a finite lifetime and are designed in a way that pieces of the technical underpinning of the Underlay can grow and adapt over time.
The primary focuses of the Underlay Project will be documented in this repo:
The ARC protocol defines the core data model and schema language for the Underlay. ARC stands for 'Assertions, Reduction, Collections'.
The basic premise is to structure knowledge graphs as a series of positive immutable statements called assertions. These transactional assertions are transformed into a singular materialized state through a process called reduction. Assertions can be grouped together in collections which define the schema and reduction mechanics. These collections are designed to be published, shared, and integrated into other collections.
The ARC protocol is developed and documented in the underlay/arc-protocol repo.
The Collection Server Protocol is used to interact with collection servers, which host collections and expose interfaces for managing, updating, and querying collections. Collection servers in the Underlay are analogous to file servers on the Web, and can be used locally or remotely.
The Collection Server Protocol is developed and document in the underlay/collection-server-protocol repo.
A registry is a hosted instance of a collection server that manages collections and implements usage policies. Registries can implement query capabilities, user authentication, social structures that facilitate collaboration, or other policies the maintainers deem useful. Registries in the Underlay are analogous to websites.
R1 is the name of the first registry being developed by the Underlay Project. It is developed in the underlay/r1 repo and accessible at https://r1.underlay.org.
The Underlay Project writes, hosts events, and invites contribution from all who are interested in contributing to the Underlay. This section captures our work to make the Underlay accessible to all.