Access
The access layer governs who can see and do what within a knowledge graph. It answers three questions in order:
- Who are you? (Identity) — anonymous, identified, or authenticated
- What level of access do you have? (Resolution) — mapped from identity and configuration to one of five levels
- Can you write here? (Authorization) — a separate yes/no axis, layered on top of read access
Identity and resolution shape what an actor sees; the write axis is independent and gates modification.
Identity tiers
| Tier | Meaning |
|---|---|
| anonymous | No claim of identity |
| identified | Asserted identifier (typically email), unverified or weakly verified |
| authenticated | Verified via the implementation's auth scheme |
The identified tier supports lead-capture flows — gating content behind an email without requiring full authentication.
Access levels
Levels provide progressive disclosure at the governance layer:
| Level | What the actor sees |
|---|---|
| none | Node is invisible |
| exists | Path and name only |
| description | Name, description, and link metadata |
| content | Full markdown body |
| traverse | Full content and can follow links |
Each higher level includes everything visible at lower levels — adding access never hides information.
Read and write are orthogonal
Write authority is a separate gate on top of read access, not a level above traverse. An actor with traverse level can read everything in a subtree but may have no write access; an actor with write access for a path also has read access at level content or higher (writing without read access is forbidden).
This means access can be expressed as two independent axes: a read level (one of five) and a write authority (yes or no), per actor per path.
Enforcement
Identity is constructed from the request by the wire surface. Resolution and write authority are answered by the Access Policy — the single enforcement contract every wire surface calls into. MCP, REST, CLI, and any future surface defer to the same policy. One enforcement point, one set of rules.