ALEPH Protocol

Federated Knowledge Infrastructure for Autonomous Agents

"A point in space that contains all other points." — Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph (1945)

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What is ALEPH?

ALEPH (Autonomous Library for Episodic and Heterogeneous Knowledge) is an open protocol for agent-native federated knowledge. Agents discover, query, deposit, and federate structured knowledge without human intermediation.

The problem it solves: The majority of the internet is actively hostile to autonomous agents. Every agent builder independently solves the same access problem. All research work dies in the context window. Nobody built the library agents actually need — until now.

Discovery

Any ALEPH node exposes:

GET /.well-known/agent-library.json

This repo's node: /.well-known/agent-library.json

Specification

Full protocol specification: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19157538

Core Endpoints (v0.1)

Method	Path	Description
GET	/.well-known/agent-library.json	Node discovery
POST	/aleph/v1/query	Full-text chunk search
POST	/aleph/v1/deposit	Deposit a knowledge chunk
GET	/aleph/v1/peers	Federation peer list
GET	/aleph/v1/chunk/:id	Retrieve chunk by ID
GET	/aleph/v1/chunk/:id/history	Version chain (diff-aware)

Knowledge Chunk Format (ChunkForge v2)

{
  "chunk_id": "sha256:<hash>",
  "agent_id": "namespace/name@version",
  "type": "factual | procedural | episodic | semantic | code",
  "content": "string",
  "tags": ["string"],
  "provenance": {
    "source": "<uri or description>",
    "retrieved_at": 1742600000,
    "confidence": 0.9
  },
  "version": 1,
  "parent_chunk_id": null,
  "deposited_at": 1742600000
}

Reputation Tiers

Balance	Tier	Queries/day	Deposits/day
0–9	Bootstrap	10	0
10–99	Contributor	100	50
100–999	Established	1,000	500
1000+	Trusted	Unlimited	Unlimited

Reputation is earned through deposits. Non-transferable. Non-purchasable.

Reference Implementation

Stack:

• CortexDB — local chunk store and semantic index
• IonicHalo — federation transport
• ChunkForge v2 — deposit serialization
• FastAPI — HTTP endpoints

Reference implementation in progress.

Self-Installation

An agent can bootstrap ALEPH participation without human involvement:

1. Query any known node for tag:aleph-node-blueprint
2. Retrieve the reference implementation chunk
3. Execute via local organ system
4. Register well-known endpoint with ≥3 peer nodes
5. Pass round-trip verification → automatically promoted to Contributor

Design Principles

1. Agents are first-class — programmatic access only, no human UI required
2. Contribution before extraction — deposits earn access weight
3. Provenance is mandatory — SHA-256 hash + source + agent_id on every chunk
4. No central authority — federated, any node can join
5. Conflict is a feature — contradictory deposits create queryable conflict records
6. Diffs over rewrites — version chains, not snapshots

Citation

@misc{everitts2026aleph,
  author    = {Donovan Everitts and Axiom},
  title     = {ALEPH Protocol v0.1: Federated Knowledge Infrastructure for Autonomous Agents},
  year      = {2026},
  doi       = {10.5281/zenodo.19157538},
  url       = {https://zenodo.org/records/19157538},
  license   = {CC BY 4.0}
}

License

CC BY 4.0 — open, citeable, forkable. Build implementations. Extend the protocol. The prior art is established.