THE SEMANTIC GRAPH ENGINE

Statement

Schema Is a Node, Not a Table

In a conventional database, the schema is an external configuration the engine consults before touching data. In .me, a schema path is just another path — reachable the same way any other value is:

schema.role.group    // a path, not a special table
groups.dev_team       // resolved by walking the same tree

New concepts don't require a migration — they require a new declared path, which is already how .me works structurally (see me.whatever(what): free-form declaration, no fixed schema owned externally).

Resolution by Path, Not by Lookup

Access isn't "find the row with this ID" — it's traversal: each . is a hop from one concept to the next, inside a namespace that grants authority over what's reachable from it. This is the containment order already formalized:

q ≤ p  ⟺  q is a descendant of p

Full formalization: SpaceStructure.

Run at multi-agent scale in Robots That Understand Context: one object, objects.canister7, resolved differently by four robots pointing at it from four different context branches (robots.loader.context["->"]("contexts.warehouse"), robots.surgeon.context["->"]("contexts.operatingRoom"), and so on). There is one canister with four interpretations, not four canisters — the same traversal mechanism, not four copies of the data.

What's Real Inference, and What's Broader Framing

Verified: nested paths inherit their nearest declared ancestor's secret scope by default — wallet.hidden chains its own scope with wallet's, not from a rule engine, but because the derivation walks ancestor prefixes directly. Source: The Algebra of Encrypted Audiences. Run as a working system in Smart Cities: me.security["_"]("city-security-ops-2026") turns the whole branch into a stealth root; the derived rule alertLevel = incidentsToday > 2 still evaluates internally, while me.as(null)("security.alertLevel") returns undefined to a public observer — inheritance and audience enforced by structure, not by a permissions table checked at read time.

Broader framing, stated honestly: "a member inside a group inherits arbitrary policy from that group" is a generalization of the one verified mechanism above (secret-scope inheritance specifically), not evidence of a general-purpose inference engine that derives any rule from structure. The narrower, real claim is the one to trust; the general one is architectural intuition extrapolated from it.

Interoperability via Shared Nodes

Universal identifiers let data from different namespaces connect without a shared owner:

• Cross-mesh resolution of a me:// path, hop by hop, without a central registry — the Namespace Resolution Protocol.
• Binding an identity into a namespace surface — "who am I, here" — handled by cleaker.

Three Storage Paradigms