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Reference

This section is the reference for OKT's two process flows and its core concepts.

Processes

Open Knowledge Tree runs two complementary processes. The Knowledge Flow turns a single source into a graph of facts, concepts, and syntheses. The Agentic Flow is what an agent does on top of that graph — research, query, and author reports — looping back to fetch more sources whenever the graph is thin.

Knowledge Flow (per-source, automatic)

Given a URL or DOI, OKT fetches the content, decomposes it into atomic self-contained facts, embeds and deduplicates them by meaning, extracts concepts and aliases to build the graph, and incrementally accumulates summaries and an authoritative synthesis per concept. Seven stages, each a background job that enqueues the next. The moment a source is fetched the pipeline runs to completion without further input.

See Knowledge Flow for the stage-by-stage walkthrough.

Agentic Flow (agent-driven, iterative)

An agent works on top of the graph in three phases — research (gather sources, open investigations, fetch them), query (search facts and concepts, read syntheses, walk related concepts), and reports (author markdown and get back per-sentence fact annotations). The phases are not a pipeline; the agent loops back to research whenever a query surfaces a thin area, and only authors a report once the graph covers the topic.

See Agentic Flow for the phase-by-phase walkthrough.

How they relate

The Knowledge Flow is the substrate. The Agentic Flow is the loop an agent runs against that substrate. The Agentic Flow feeds the Knowledge Flow (every fetchAndProcessSource enqueues the 7-stage pipeline) and reads from it (every searchFacts, getConcept, getRelatedConcepts reads what the pipeline produced). The two processes together form the engine: sources in, annotated reports out, with a growing knowledge graph as the durable artifact in between.

Agentic Flow (loop)
+---------------------------------------------------+
| research -> query -> (thin?) -> research -> ... |
| | | |
| v v |
| fetchAndProcessSource searchFacts/getConcept |
| | read syntheses |
+-------|---------|----------------------------------+
v ^
Knowledge Flow (per source)
+-----------------+
| source -> facts -> embed -> dedup |
| -> concepts -> summaries -> synthesis |
+-----------------+

The Knowledge Flow runs unattended once a source is fetched. The Agentic Flow is where judgement lives — which sources to fetch, when the graph is enough, what to write in the report. The MCP tools are the agent's verbs across both processes.

Concepts

The Concepts pages define the core artifacts OKT produces and stores: facts, concepts and contexts, summaries and synthesis, and reports and auto-annotation. See Concepts for the overview.

Examples

The Examples subsection ships static, self-contained snapshots of real OKT meta-synthesis reports. Every sentence that has supporting facts is clickable — click it to see the underlying facts and their source URLs, the same interaction the in-app report view provides. See Example Meta-Syntheses.