Portent is an open specification for work and personal knowledge bases.
It gives you a small set of defaults for organizing information: clear types, generic graph-like relationships, and a simple lifecycle for captured knowledge. The goal is to make a knowledge base easy for humans and agents to understand, without forcing every team or person to invent a custom system first.
Portent favors convention over configuration. Instead of asking “where should this go?”, it asks:
- What is this?
- What is it useful for?
- Is it captured, organized, or archived?
Portent defines eight default types. PORT types are actionable things to do: Projects, Operations, Responsibilities, and Tasks. ENTP types are non-actionable knowledge records: Events, Notes, Topics, and People.
Portent models knowledge as a graph. The two default relationships are:
belongs_to: an ownership or composition relationship.related_to: a looser semantic connection.
These defaults are enough to model most knowledge bases while staying easy to extend when a system needs more specific relationship names.
Portent separates capture from organization:
- Capture information quickly so it is not lost.
- Organize it by assigning a type and useful relationships.
- Archive it when it has served its purpose.
A Portent-compatible knowledge base needs:
- A way to assign one Portent type to each item.
- A way to express lifecycle state, either with separate properties or a single status property.
- A way to link items through relationships, such as Markdown wikilinks or frontmatter fields.
Portent is easiest to implement in Tolaria, but it is designed to be portable across file-based systems, note apps, docs tools, and agent-readable vaults.
- Website: https://portent.md
- Template vault: https://github.com/refactoringhq/portent-vault-template
- Spec repository: https://github.com/refactoringhq/portent
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