Open specification · knowledge for AI agents · v0.1 draft

Every fact has truth only in context.

microon is an open specification for knowledge that AI agents can trust — quads that carry their context: layer, time window, origin. Who asserted a fact, when it held, and who may change it are queryable facts, not policy documents. Five principles are normative. Everything else is implementation-defined.

sensor-fcu01-st01subject currentValuepredicate 22.5object

context statelayer 2026-04-05T14:30:00Zvalid from —valid to (still true) pda-fieldbusasserted by

A quad. The triple states a reading; the context states the conditions under which it is true. The building the sensor belongs to is a separate fact: sensor-fcu01-st01 · locatedIn · bld-jn1420.

The five principles

A system that satisfies all five principles is a microon system, independent of storage, query language, transport, or vocabulary.

P1 / 5

A fact without context does not exist.

Every fact is a quad: subject, predicate, object, context. Context holds the fact’s conditions of truth — its layer, its time window, its origin. A bare triple is not a valid microon fact.

Context is not topic. What a fact concerns is expressed by predicates (locatedIn, partOf) and queried like any other fact.

P2 / 5

Truth has duration.

The store is append-only. Each fact is valid from a moment until a moment; an open end means currently true. Update means: close the old fact and assert the new one, atomically. Point-in-time queries require no additional machinery.

P3 / 5

Every fact has an origin.

Every fact records the agent that asserted it — a device, a person, a service, an AI agent. Implementations MUST reject facts without a verifiable origin. Confidence (measured / inferred / declared) is an optional extension on the same axis.

P4 / 5

Knowledge has layers.

Every fact belongs to exactly one of five layers. The layer set is fixed and identical in every domain. Authorization facts are ordinary quads in the authz layer, with time windows and origins like any other fact.

schemadefinitions — entity types and properties

structuretopology — placement, containment, connections

statecurrent values — readings, positions, setpoints

metaquality — calibration, firmware, lineage

authzpermissions — read and write rights per layer

P5 / 5

Simplicity is a commitment.

microon excludes inference engines, reification, blank nodes, and mandatory serialization formats. Reference storage model: one table of quads. Target: understood in one page, implemented in a weekend.

Normative and implementation-defined

microon defines no conformance suite and no committee. The five principles are normative. Everything else is implementation-defined.

Normative — this is microon

The quad: subject, predicate, object, context
Time window on every fact; append-only store
Verifiable origin on every fact
The five layers: schema · structure · state · meta · authz
No inference, no reification, no blank nodes

Implementation-defined

Predicate and entity-type vocabularies
Identifier conventions
Additional context elements — confidence, visibility, access
Isolation — one shared store, or one store per owner or site
Storage engine, query language, transport

Built for AI agents

An agent acting on the physical world needs three answers before every action: is this fact current, who says so, and am I allowed. In microon all three are queries against the same store.

sensor-fcu01-st01  currentValue  22.5            [state · pda-fieldbus · 14:30 → —]
agt-edgar          mayWrite      state/setpoint  [authz · usr-tom     · granted, revocable]

Trust is queryable

Every fact carries a verified origin and a time window. Stale, unverifiable input — the root of agent failure — is detectable by construction.

Permission is a fact

What an agent may read or write is stored in the authz layer as ordinary quads: granted by someone, valid from–until, revocable by closing the fact.

Readable by machines first

The specification ships as plain Markdown (/spec/index.md), a language-model index (/llms.txt), and JSON-LD on every page.

Position among existing representations

Existing knowledge representations attach context, time, and origin as extensions. microon defines them as part of the fact.

	Core unit	Context	Time	Origin	Authz	Complexity
RDF / OWL	triple	named graphs	—	PROV-O	—	very high
JSON-LD	document	@context	—	—	—	medium
Brick Schema	triple	—	—	—	—	medium
Project Haystack	tag dict	—	—	—	—	low
microon	quad	✓	✓	✓	✓	low

The specification defines the quad, the five principles, the layer set, the minimal operation set, and non-normative conventions. Machine-readable: /spec/index.md · /llms.txt

Read the specification →