Kernary

Kernary is a model-driven ontology engine. It compiles external domain
ontologies and corpora into versioned runtimes for agents and applications.
An agent can query an immutable snapshot, receive a constrained selection plan,
and call policy-gated actions through an embedded SDK, MCP, or HTTP.

Kernary does not ship a production ontology. Types, fields, relations,
projections, retrieval profiles, actions, policies, and validators belong to an
external Model Package. Units and assets belong to a Corpus Package. Ticket,
Recipe, Security, and Frontend Design are examples built on the engine; none is
built into Core.

Model Package + Corpus Package + Adapters
                    │
                    ▼
        parser → IR → compiler → snapshot
                    │
          query plan      action plan
                    │          │
       constraints      policy + evidence
                    └────┬─────┘
                 SDK · MCP · HTTP

Verify the engine

Kernary currently uses Bun for the workspace toolchain.

bun install --frozen-lockfile
bun run typecheck
bun run test
bun run build

The test suite loads several external models, including Ticket, Recipe, and
Security. This is a conformance property: adding a domain type or relation must
not require an engine change.

Build the maintained example

The repository still carries the .prime v1 compatibility syntax while the
v0.2 package CLI is being consolidated. The maintained build entry point today
is:

bun scripts/build-atom-dirs.ts \
  --src examples/hello-world/primes/sources \
  --out examples/hello-world/primes/compiled \
  --model compat/prime-v1-model \
  --corpus org.example/hello-world \
  --release 2026-08-31

The command emits an immutable bundle, model.lock, _index.xml, and
corpus.manifest.json. compat/prime-v1-model owns the historical Atom schema;
it is a compatibility Model Package, not Kernary Core.

Start the generic MCP transport against that exact model and bundle:

PRIME_DIR=examples/hello-world/primes/compiled \
PRIME_MODEL_DIR=compat/prime-v1-model \
bun packages/mcp-server-core/src/index.ts

PRIME_*, .prime, prime/*, the prime CLI alias, and the published
@skill-wiki/* npm scope are compatibility identifiers. New documentation uses
Kernary for the product. See the naming ADR
for the migration boundary.

Package model

• Model Package: types, relations, projections, retrieval, functions,
  actions, policies, validators, and migrations.
• Corpus Package: units, assets, provenance, licence policy, and release
  identity.
• Adapter Package: external source or provider integration.
• Domain Package: a deployable composition of a model, corpus, adapters,
  tools, and optional Agent Skills.

A Skill can explain how an Agent should use a Domain Package. It does not own
schema, grant capabilities, or replace the SDK and transports.

Query and action are separate paths

Query planning resolves candidates, features, hard and soft constraints,
relation semantics, projection load order, and token budgets. A Selection Plan
explains what the runtime selected and why.

Actions use a separate authorization path. External writes require a declared
Action, principal and capability checks, preflight, policy and human approval
where required, idempotency, and append-only event evidence. Being able to read
a unit never grants permission to change state.

Packages

• Declarations: model-schema, corpus-schema
• Compile pipeline: parser, ir, compiler, bundle
• Read path: runtime, query-engine, constraint-solver, projection-engine
• Write path: action-runtime, policy-engine, event-store
• Integration: sdk, sdk-codegen, mcp-server-core, http-server, cli
• Tooling: language-server, plugin-host, registry, observability, testkit

Documentation

• Start here
• Package model
• Compilation and snapshots
• Selection and execution
• Terminology
• Legacy Prime v1 specifications

Kernary is Apache-2.0 licensed. Current remote and npm names remain unchanged
until their external rename and dual-publish steps are complete.