Why Katalyst? on Katalyst Documentation

What is curation?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What is curation?#

If AI systems are going to curate content effectively, they need a clear target: what counts as curation, and what good curation should accomplish.

Let’s start from examples. The work of curation shows up in many practical tasks:

summarizing the useful parts of a conversation thread in a document that people can find later
grouping related notes so they are easier to browse
adding dates, owners, tags, or status labels so people know what they are looking at
rewriting headings so a reader can scan the page before committing to it
removing duplicate or stale material

These tasks look different, but they all share the same purpose: making content usable.

Internal consistency

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Internal consistency#

Consistency means being free from internal contradiction. On its surface, this seems simple: the knowledge base can’t say “A is true” in one place and “A is false” in another.

Content claims vs structural claims#

However, there’s some subtlety here. Imagine a folder containing customer feedback interviews. In one transcript, customer A says, “this product is amazing!” In another, customer B says “the product is terrible.” Those statements are in direct contradiction, but is the knowledge base inconsistent?

Completeness

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Completeness#

Completeness means covering all the relevant material within some scope.

The scope matters. A knowledge base does not need to contain every true fact in the world. It needs to contain the material required by the purpose it claims to serve.

Claims about ordering rely on claims about completeness

Up-to-dateness

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Up-to-dateness#

Up-to-dateness is the guarantee of external consistency: the state of the content accurately reflects the state of the real world at some point in time. A knowledge base can be internally consistent and complete within its stated scope while still being wrong, because the world changed since the content was last updated.

That makes up-to-dateness different from the other two criteria. It cannot be guaranteed from inside the content alone. It requires contact with an external source of truth: an event stream, a periodic refresh, a source-system query, a human review, or some other verification process. A curated system can record timestamps, sources, freshness windows, and update rules, but the guarantee comes from the process that reconnects the content to the world.

Progressive operations

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Progressive Operations#

How storage backends evolve as query complexity grows. Each tier unlocks new operations, but requires structural commitments the previous tier doesn’t.

Structuredness comes down to which operations a backend supports, and schemas and checks are the means: enforcing checks is what makes new operations available. The core thesis follows: many knowledge systems start as filesystems and progressively acquire database-like structure. The progression isn’t arbitrary, each tier is driven by a class of operations that can’t be satisfied at the previous level.