Concepts & Roles

The core ideas you will meet throughout Polaris, and how access is governed. For a plain-language lookup of individual terms, see the Glossary.

The brain and its lifecycle

A brain is a single tenant's governed knowledge base. Every tenant user is bound to one brain. A brain moves through three states, surfaced as a coloured pill on the Dashboard:

State	Meaning
Empty	No content yet — nothing ingested.
Building	Has draft content (change sets), but nothing published.
Published	At least one certified version is live. The Advisor and Wiki are available.

The draft → certify → publish pipeline

Nothing reaches the published corpus without passing through this governed pipeline:

flowchart LR
    subgraph propose[Propose]
        S[Scout: new sources]
        N[Sentinel: drift flags]
    end
    subgraph curate[Curate — Librarian, HITL]
        CS[Change set] --> RV[Human review] --> DR[Draft]
    end
    DR --> CE{Certify\nsafety gate}
    CE -->|pass| PUB[Published version]
    PUB --> WIKI[Wiki + Advisor]
    S --> CS
    N --> CS

• Propose — Scout and Sentinel only ever propose. They never write the corpus.
• Curate — the Librarian is the single write gate. A human reviews every change set.
• Certify — a safety hard-gate runs before a version is published.
• Publish — publishing produces an immutable version and (re)generates the Wiki.

Key objects

Object	What it is
Candidate	A source Scout discovered (or you uploaded), awaiting a decision to target or reject.
Change set	A bundle of proposed knowledge units (facts, rubrics, graph entities) extracted from one document, awaiting review.
Knowledge unit	An individual fact or rubric inside a change set that you include or exclude.
Escalation	A flagged item in a change set that requires an explicit reviewer decision before commit.
Flag	A drift/integrity issue Sentinel raised against an already-ingested source.
Version	An immutable, certified snapshot of the corpus. The Advisor serves from published versions only.
Citation	The source passage that grounds a served claim (cite-then-verify).

Roles & access

Polaris is role-based (RBAC), with a nested hierarchy — each tier includes everything below it:

Reader  ⊂  Curator  ⊂  Admin

Role	Typical capabilities
Reader	View dashboards, the Wiki, read-only panels, and consult the Advisor.
Curator	Run Scout & Sentinel sweeps, ingest documents, review & approve change sets, certify & publish.
Admin	Manage Settings & API keys, view Cost, manage the team, and everything a Curator can do.

When an action is outside your role, the UI does not hide the platform from you — it shows the control in a locked state (dimmed, with a lock icon and a tooltip explaining what is needed) or renders the panel read-only. Each feature page notes its specific gates.

Platform admins

A separate platform admin account type operates the whole fleet from the Platform Console and can impersonate any tenant. This is distinct from a tenant Admin, who administers a single brain.