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Reviewed-content contract

The public Cortex contract distinguishes content that can guide ecosystem work from content that is merely present in the repository or generated locally.

Eligible durable guidance

  • Paper records whose index and summary both carry status: reviewed.
  • Taxonomies or curated guides that contain substantive reviewed content and are deliberately added to the documentation navigation.
  • Operator and architecture documentation under docs/ that passes the strict site build and repository review.

Eligibility does not automatically publish a file. Content is public only when it is deliberately placed under docs/ and is not matched by exclude_docs; navigation controls discovery, not publication. Internal plans must stay outside docs/ or be explicitly excluded.

Not public guidance

  • stub or draft paper summaries;
  • TODO-only taxonomy and curated-guide placeholders;
  • private PDFs and Drive identifiers as a content-delivery mechanism;
  • .cognee/ databases, embeddings, caches, and backups;
  • fuzzy or semantic merge proposals and generated histories;
  • internal implementation plans; and
  • model-generated query answers.

These artifacts may support review or operation, but consumers should not cite them as the canonical Cortex position.

Review checklist

A record promoted to reviewed should have:

  1. matching DOI, title, authors, year, and status across its sources;
  2. a plain-language summary grounded in the publication;
  3. explicit contributions, limitations, and HSSM relevance;
  4. graph relationships that are supported rather than inferred from naming similarity alone;
  5. valid internal paths and no credentials, private file content, or personal machine locations; and
  6. a clean uv run cortex-validate --strict result or a documented reason for any accepted metadata warning before promotion.

Generated retrieval state can then be refreshed from the reviewed commit. The refresh does not change the review status of its inputs or outputs.