Foundations

Before Part 1 introduces the roadmap proper, this section gets the shared vocabulary and a couple of mental pictures in place, so the later material has something solid to build on instead of defining terms as it goes.

What's here

• Mental models — two original scenes (a recipe notebook vs. an expo rail, a hiker's trail journal vs. a search team's incident board) that make "graph as shared memory" concrete before any formal terms show up.
• The two graphs — an intro-level look at why a record of attempts and a record of checked facts need to stay separate, worked through a support-ticket example. The fuller treatment, with a different example, comes later once more of the material is in place.
• Glossary — one-paragraph, course-specific definitions for every term used from here on: graph, node, edge, work-history graph, fact graph, extraction, resolution, provenance, subgraph, grounding, governance graph, anchor, frozen node, counter-metric.
• Concepts — introduces comprehension debt: the idea that a shared graph only a subset of the team actually understands is accumulating risk, the same way undocumented code does.

Reading order

There's no required order, but if you want one: mental models first (for the picture), then the two graphs (for the first real distinction), then the glossary (for the exact words), then concepts (for what goes wrong at scale). Skip straight to the glossary if you just want a definition and move on.

Once this section feels solid, the roadmap's opening step is waiting in the next section.