Role
Turns loose notes into addressable knowledge that agents can route, validate, and connect.
Component / Structure
Schema & frontmatter
The typed shape of the vault: metadata, entity fields, topics, status, source links, project slugs, dates, and classification rules.
Contains
- Frontmatter on notes
- system/contracts/life-os-schema.yaml
- Topics, entities, source IDs, project slugs
- Canonical naming and field conventions
Interfaces
- Validation scripts enforce it
- Capture flows write into it
- Index/read models depend on it
Maintenance rule
When a type of note repeats, give it predictable metadata instead of relying on prose conventions.
Reliability signal
Agents can filter, validate, and route records without guessing the entity, status, project, or source.
What goes in
New durable records should declare their type, source, status, and relations early enough that validation can catch drift instead of humans remembering every convention.
What comes out
Good metadata makes notes queryable, sortable, and safe for agents to summarize without guessing whether something is a task, decision, reference, or draft.
Quality check
Does the record declare what it is, where it came from, which entity or project it concerns, and whether an agent may treat it as current?
Concrete example
A captured reference can declare type, topic, source URL, created date, confidence, and related entity. The schema makes it clear whether this is durable knowledge, a draft, or only temporary context.
What stays private
The page explains metadata behavior and validation intent, not the full private schema vocabulary or personal entity graph.
Failure mode: Without schema, the vault becomes a pile of Markdown instead of a knowledge system.