---
title: "Knowledge Vaults"
slug: "knowledge-vaults"
category: "knowledge-vaults"
tags: ["moc", "knowledge-vaults", "zettelkasten", "obsidian", "research"]
status: "stable"
last_updated: 2026-08-29
summary: "How to architect, orchestrate, audit, and evolve a Markdown knowledge vault that both humans and LLM agents can work in without corrupting it."
---

> A knowledge vault is a folder of plain Markdown notes with typed frontmatter, explicit links, and a machine-checkable schema. It compounds when it is atomic, sourced, and audited; it rots when it becomes a folder of long documents nobody links. These pages cover the architecture, the orchestration loop that agents run against it, and the audit gates that keep it honest.

## Architecture

- [[vault-architecture]]: Numbered folder tree, note types scoped to the work, a spec file as the source of truth, and generation over hand-building.
- [[atomic-notes]]: One idea per note, titles written as claims, 100 to 500 words, three to seven outbound links, deliberate status promotion.
- [[vault-frontmatter-schema]]: Per-type required fields, empty arrays over missing keys, framework schema extensions, and pruning fields nobody queries.
- [[linking-and-tags]]: Links carry meaning, tags carry state, every link explained in prose, block references for citing paragraphs, MOCs grown from clusters.
- [[rigor-frameworks]]: Map the domain to a rigor framework (MECE, ADR, IRAC, claim-evidence-counter, and the rest), layer frameworks, or compose one from primitives.

## Evidence and decisions

- [[source-verification]]: One source note per work, every empirical claim linked to it, verification dates that expire, and the corroboration gate before anything is publishable.
- [[decision-journals]]: Journal at decision time, keep the pre-decision section immutable, record alternatives and driving atoms, review by class.

## Operations

- [[vault-orchestration]]: The capture, extract, link, audit loop an agent runs against a vault, the sub-prompts it uses, and the guardrails on bulk writes.
- [[vault-audit]]: The deterministic auditor, the rule catalog, spec-driven configuration, root-cause triage, and mechanical autofix.
- [[semantic-audit]]: The fixed-rubric LLM judge for defects code cannot detect, evidence-gated verdicts, and run-over-run comparison.
- [[vault-maintenance]]: Weekly, monthly, and quarterly review protocols, Dataview quality gates, and the maintenance budget as a design constraint.
- [[vault-evolution]]: Add, deprecate, migrate; never rebuild. The four moves that grow a vault without severing its link network.
- [[team-vaults]]: Git as the sync substrate, designing merge conflicts out, naming authority, and the auditor as a CI gate on pull requests.

## Related MOCs

- [[tooling/index|Tooling]]
- [[ai-agents/index|AI Agents]]
- [[file-organization/index|File Organization]]