How It Works

Lookup & Inheritance

A fact resolves in a fixed order: your home namespace, then the parent namespaces above it, then explicit read-only lookups into other registries. The first match wins.

Agent asks for a fact in

Your Company / company.sales.west

Your Company

Home registry · writable

1
company.sales.west
checking…

Home namespace — every channel is visible, and you can write here.

2
company.sales
published

Parent namespace (implicit from the dotted name) — published facts only.

3
company
published

Top of the dotted hierarchy — still implicit, published only.

Parent namespaces are implicit — derived from the dotted name, no registration needed.

lookupread-only

Unifact

Org-public · read-only

4
company.guidelines
read-only

Explicit lookup into an org-public namespace — published, read-only. No writes, no push.

Added with uni lookup add. Reads published facts; never grants write or push.

Not local, so resolution walks up the dotted hierarchy and finds it in company.sales.

1

Home namespace

Your own namespace is checked first, across every channel — working, proposed, review, and published. This is the only place you can write.

2

Parent namespaces

If it is not local, resolution walks up the dotted hierarchy (company.sales.west → company.sales → company). Parents are implicit — no setup — and only published facts are visible.

3

Explicit lookups

Finally, any lookups you added point at another registry’s org-public namespace. They read published facts only, and never grant write or push access.

Registry

Who may write

A registry is a tenancy boundary — its own owner, members, and approvals. You can only write and push to registries you belong to. Create one when a team or product needs to control who writes.

Namespace

Which topic

A namespace is a topic folder inside a registry, with a dotted hierarchy for parents. A name cannot be both a registry and a namespace. Create one to group facts, not to gate membership.

Org-public

Shared basics, without sharing everything

A namespace can be marked org-public so any registry on the same host can discover it and look up its published facts — read-only, and never internet-public. UniFact publishes company.guidelines this way; its decisions, constraints, and infrastructure stay private.

One truth, shared the way you choose

Inheritance keeps facts DRY within a registry; lookups share the essentials across them.