Teaching Ingence your words#

What a word means in your laboratory is something only your laboratory knows. Ingence does not guess at it. It gives you three places to say it: answers in the Dashboard, the Rulebook you can read and tune, and settings. This guide shows the commands that go with each.

Every command here takes -p PROJECT (or --project PROJECT). Without it, Ingence looks for a project around the folder you are in.

See what Ingence knows and does not know#

ingence teach unknown -p PROJECT

This lists the recurring parts of your names that the Dictionary matched nothing for, most widespread first: ordered by how many different files carry a word, because a word that appears forty times in one name says less than a word that appears once in each of forty names. Each row gives the word, what kind of part it is, how many entries and occurrences carry it, and how it was written. The first column says which kind of “not known” it is (How Ingence thinks):

  • no_evidence: nobody has told Ingence about this word. It is a candidate for the Dictionary.

  • conflicting: the Dictionary holds the word more than once. Decide which meaning is right, or declare it ambiguous.

  • unexamined: the reader never looked at this one.

ingence teach vocabulary -p PROJECT

This is the other side: the words the Dictionary did recognize in your folder, by kind (format, stage, vessel, technique and so on), with the count of entries for each. It also says how many of the shipped meanings fired at all. It reads and changes nothing.

ingence teach shapes -p PROJECT

This shows the shapes your names take: a name with its content replaced by its kind, such as {DATE}_{WORD}_{WORD}, grouped, with how many entries share each. It tells you how your laboratory names things, and carries no actual word of yours, so it is safe to keep. --out FILE writes the whole list as CSV.

ingence teach collisions -p PROJECT

This lists spellings that two meanings both claim, and whether Ingence reports the tie or decides it. --decided shows only the ones one meaning wins outright.

--limit N (or -n N) sets how many rows unknown, vocabulary, shapes and collisions show. The default is 40.

Say what a word means#

You answer in the Dashboard. A word nothing reads becomes a question, and your answer is written to the Record under your name. Like every change, it waits for Re-run before it changes what you see. The Dashboard’s page for words shows the whole Dictionary, and you can add a pack there.

To keep what you taught outside the project, or to give it to another laboratory, export it as a pack (Domain packs):

ingence teach export-answers -p PROJECT --out ours.yaml

Read the rules#

ingence rule show -p PROJECT

This prints the rules in force, as English, with a digest that identifies exactly this set. Every rule reads at the value in force, so the sentence says what the engine will do, not what it was shipped doing. With -p, your project’s own changes are included, and beside each rule the Record says what people decided about its conclusions: how many were confirmed, rejected and noted.

rule show only reads. You change a rule in the Dashboard, where the change is recorded and waits for Re-run. -r N (or --revision N) shows the rules as they stood at revision N.

Settings#

Settings are meant to change how Ingence runs and not what it concludes. The test for a setting is whether changing it alters what the engine believes or only how fast it gets there. The commitments that alter belief are in the Rulebook instead. The line is not sharp: a setting such as dictionary.years changes how names are read, and so changes what Ingence reads out of them. A run’s record states the years it used.

A project’s settings are in its settings.yaml. The file holds only what differs from the defaults. Delete it, or delete a line, and the engine returns to its defaults. For example, to change which years a date in a name may fall in, add that line beside the others already under dictionary::

dictionary:
  years: [1990, present]

This sets the first and last year a date written in a name may fall in. A date-shaped number outside those years is read as a number, such as a sample’s. present means the year of the run itself, so a re-run of the same project is reproducible from the years its run states.

The Dashboard shows every setting with its purpose in plain words and links each to the rules that read it. Changes to settings wait for Re-run like any other change.

Note

Edit settings.yaml between commands, not while one runs. After you change a setting that affects how names are read, run ingence index --rebind -p PROJECT, then ingence infer -p PROJECT, or press Re-run in the Dashboard.