HEKB

A knowledge operating substrate. HEKB stores facts, relates them, and finds them again.

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Why HEKB?

HEKB provides content-addressed knowledge storage where identity is derived from the fact itself rather than assigned by the application.

Reasoning systems need a place for facts that independent writers can name the same way, whose names prove their contents, and that the store itself never interprets.

Databases store rows. Vector indexes find similar vectors. Graph engines traverse edges. None of them make identity a mathematical property of the fact.

HEKB exists to be that layer—and to stop there.

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Quick Example

from hekb import HextObject, HextKind, KnowledgeStore

store = KnowledgeStore()

object_id = store.put(
    HextObject(
        kind=HextKind.DOCUMENT,
        labels={
            "text": "a kettle boils water"
        },
    )
)

print(store.get(object_id).labels["text"])
# a kettle boils water

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Core Concepts

HEXT Object

An immutable fact.

Its identifier is the BLAKE2b-256 hash of its canonical representation.

The same fact always has the same identifier everywhere.

Morphism

A typed, weighted relationship between two HEXT objects.

Retrieval

HEKB exposes three retrieval primitives:

• nearest
• neighbours
• geodesic

HEKB does not:

• embed text
• resolve entities
• rank importance
• infer meaning
• evaluate risk

It stores attributes without interpreting them.

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Comparison

	Vector DB	Graph DB	Knowledge Graph	NVS-Kernel	HEKB
Primary job	Approximate similarity	Property graph	Ontology & inference	Runtime safety & control	Content-addressed facts
Identity	User-defined	User-defined	Entity resolution	Runtime/session state	Hash of canonical content
Makes decisions	Ranking	Planner	Inference	Yes	No
Best for	Semantic search	Complex traversal	Knowledge reasoning	Runtime control	Stable, immutable facts

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HEKB vs NVS-Kernel

HEKB stores. NVS-Kernel decides.

NVS-Kernel is a client of HEKB.

HEKB has no dependency on NVS-Kernel.

See docs/NVS-Kernel.md for architectural boundaries.

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Install

pip install hekb

Or clone the repository and run:

examples/quickstart.py

For the server, CLI, C++ runtime, and MCP interface, see:

• docs/Quickstart.md

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Documentation

• Quickstart
• Examples
• ABI
• API Reference
• Python API
• FAQ
• Documentation Site
• SECURITY
• CONTRIBUTING

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License

Apache License 2.0

See LICENSE and NOTICE for details.