CORTEX

Cortex

An ontology-backed knowledge graph memory store with branch-based ingestion, provenance, inference, and full-text search — exposed to AI agents over MCP.

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What is Cortex?

Adding one Spring Boot starter auto-configures a complete, ontology-grounded knowledge-graph memory for your application — backed by Apache Jena, gated by human review, and designed to be read and written by AI agents over the Model Context Protocol.

Ontology-grounded

You supply the vocabulary (ontology.ttl), the SHACL shapes (ontology.shapes), and the inference rules (ontology.rules). Every assertion is linted and validated against them before it can enter the graph.

Human-in-the-loop

Incoming assertions are staged on a branch as an RDF patch. Nothing reaches the approved graph until a human reviews and approves it — agents propose, people decide.

Agent-native (MCP)

A Spring AI MCP server exposes Lint, Ingest, Query, Ask, Describe, and Search tools plus the ontology as a resource, so agents ground their reads and writes in your schema.

Provenance built in

Every ingestion is a PROV-O prov:Activity; every approved statement is reified and linked with prov:wasGeneratedBy. You always know where a fact came from and when.

Inference & search

Jena rule-based inference extends the graph incrementally on each approval; a Lucene full-text index over labels and comments tolerates typos and ranks by relevance.

Durable by design

Approved assertions live in a TDB2 store — in memory, or on disk. Optional scheduled backups to S3 and restore-on-startup let an ephemeral replica come up fully seeded.

Install

Requires JDK 21 and Spring Boot 4.0. Add the starter — it brings everything the graph, the web UI, and the MCP server need.

Gradle (build.gradle.kts) 
implementation("ai.chatur:cortex-spring-boot-starter:0.1.2")
Maven (pom.xml) 
<dependency>
  <groupId>ai.chatur</groupId>
  <artifactId>cortex-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
  <version>0.1.2</version>
</dependency>

Full getting-started guide → Tutorial: a vocabulary with SKOS →

Modules

Cortex is split across five Gradle modules; the first four publish independently to Maven Central under the ai.chatur group.

ModulePurpose
cortex-apiThe public contract: the Cortex interface, its nine role interfaces, and the data records. Pure Java — no dependencies.
cortex-coreThe Jena-backed implementation (JenaCortex) and CortexBuilder, which assembles a Cortex without Spring.
cortex-spring-boot-autoconfigureSpring Boot auto-configuration for the Cortex bean, the web UI controllers, and the MCP tools and resources.
cortex-spring-boot-starterThe single dependency consumers add; brings the autoconfigure module plus the Spring MVC and Thymeleaf dependencies the web UI needs.
cortex-spring-boot-starter-exampleA runnable example app with a sample ontology, shapes, and rules. Not published.

Project details

License Apache-2.0 Group ai.chatur JDK 21+ Spring Boot 4.0+ Latest 0.1.2