Kogust

Kogust is a fictional data formalism used in speculative artificial intelligence and distributed systems narratives. In the imagined ecosystem, a kogust is the smallest shareable unit of knowledge, pairing a factual statement with meta-information about certainty, origin, and time.

Origin and meaning: The term kogust combines imagined roots for knowledge and evidence-gusts; it was introduced in a 2043 science fiction treatise within the setting of the Arcadia network. The concept is designed to explore how knowledge can be represented, shared, and trusted across autonomous agents.

Definition and structure: A kogust consists of fields such as statement (a concise claim), confidence (a numeric value between 0 and 1), provenance (list of source references), timestamp, and an optional explanation. It is intended to be merged with other kogust by consensus and to be pruned when confidence declines or provenance is invalidated.

Operations: Basic operations include merge (combining kogust with compatible provenance), filter by confidence, and query by topic. The formalism supports tracing uncertainty and updating belief states as new kogust arrive.

Applications: In the fictional world, kogust underpins collaborative reasoning among autonomous agents, data fusion for simulations, and explainable AI outputs. It enables traceable decision paths and reproducible results in multi-agent experiments and virtual environments.

Criticism and security: Critics in the narrative point to potential diffusion of misinformation through conflicting provenance and the risk of malicious sources inflating confidence. Security models propose provenance verification, versioning, and hierarchical trust structures.

See also: knowledge provenance, data fusion, knowledge graph. References to in-universe publications appear in Arcadia Library, Volume 7.