Time-Travel

Navigate QNTX's attestation history to understand how knowledge evolved.

Core Concept

Every attestation has a timestamp (✦) and causal links (⟶), creating a complete navigable history of system intelligence.

What Makes It Unique

• Causal chains - See why things happened, not just what
• Live reconstruction - Rebuild exact system state at any moment
• Cross-domain - Attestations span code, data, and decisions
• AI-queryable - LLMs can understand and navigate the timeline

Primary Use Case

Watch knowledge evolution - how the system's understanding developed over time through continuous learning cycles.

Temporal Dimensions

• System Time - When events occurred in QNTX's overall timeline
• Stream Time - Position within a data stream
• Window Width - How much temporal context to show (affects graph filtering)
• Cumulative State - Query accumulated values across time windows, not just point-in-time snapshots

Visual Concept: Z-Axis Time Layering

• Recent attestations render on top, fully opaque
• Older attestations fade into background (z-axis depth)
• Click faded tiles to "jump back" to that time
• Rolling window follows scrubber position

AI Integration

• AI inference results tied to both stream time and system time
• Graph evolution animated as stream plays
• Future: semantic-aware temporal queries using ML-derived relatedness scores

Technical Foundation

• History depth managed by bounded storage
• Temporal range queries (since, until, between)
• Alternate timelines through attestation abstraction
• Rolling window filters for continuous monitoring

Future: Self-Describing Temporal Schemas

Vision: Ingesters attest their own temporal structure, making QNTX fully domain-agnostic.

# Ingestor declares temporal schema via attestations
ingester:example -> has_temporal_field -> "start_time"
ingester:example -> has_duration_field -> "duration_months"
ingester:example -> temporal_unit -> "months"
ingester:example -> temporal_format -> "RFC3339"

Benefits:

• Zero hardcoded conventions - no assumptions about field names
• Cross-domain composability - any temporal data works without code changes
• Dynamic query planning - aggregation strategy derived from attestations
• Self-describing ingesters - like node_type attestations, but for temporal properties

This extends the attestation abstraction to time itself, completing QNTX's domain-agnostic vision.

Related Vision

• Continuous Intelligence - The paradigm that generates the history
• Glyphs - Attestable glyph state enables time-travel UI
• Fractal Workspace - Visualize time-travel through glyph manifestations

Roadmap

Phase 1: Temporal Range Queries ✅

• since, until, on, between temporal expressions

Phase 2: Semantic Awareness (planned)

• Weighted aggregation via relatedness scores
• Combined temporal + semantic filtering

Reference (XTDB temporal SQL): XTDB v2's bitemporal query extensions (FOR VALID_TIME AS OF, FOR SYSTEM_TIME AS OF) are a well-designed ergonomic reference if ATS temporal expressions grow beyond since/until/on/between. XTDB distinguishes valid time (when the fact was true) from system time (when the system recorded it) — a distinction that maps to attestation time vs. ingestion time.

Footnote (OverFilter): Duration aggregation (over 5y) was explored as a query-time accumulation mechanism — summing duration predicates across attestations per subject to answer "who has over N years of X?" It was removed: the complexity of plugin-provided numeric predicates, unit conversion, and temporal windowing didn't justify itself. If temporal accumulation returns, it belongs in a materialized view or plugin, not the query path.

Footnote (QueryExpander): Natural language semantic expansion ("is engineer" → role=engineer OR title=engineer) was explored as a Go interface (QueryExpander) that domain-specific implementations could use to expand predicates into semantic equivalents. It was removed: the abstraction added complexity without a concrete implementation beyond NoOp. If semantic expansion returns, it belongs as attestation-based expansion rules (expansions are themselves attestations) or as a plugin service (e.g., MeiliSearch via ADR-015), not baked into the query path.