Core concepts
Commit
How raw text and files become structured memory.
POST /memories writes memory into a
namespace. You send raw content; Illumina extracts the structure.
What happens on commit
- Fact extraction — the content is decomposed into discrete semantic facts using an LLM with forced tool-use.
- Entity recognition — people, systems, and concepts are extracted and linked to existing entities in the namespace.
- Embedding — each fact is embedded for semantic retrieval.
- Deduplication — near-duplicate facts merge instead of accumulating.
- Linking — temporal, semantic, and entity links connect the new facts into the namespace's knowledge graph.
Commit is asynchronous: the response carries an operation_id you can
track on the operations API. A duplicate
commit of the same content collapses onto the in-flight operation, so
retries are safe.
Shaping what gets committed
Each item accepts more than content:
timestamp— when the fact happened (defaults to now). Drives temporal search and recency scoring.context— a short hint about the setting ("standup", "support ticket").document_id— groups items into a document. Committing the samedocument_idagain upserts: old facts from that document are replaced (or appended, withupdate_mode: "append").tags— labels for filtering search and illuminate later.metadata— arbitrary string key-values carried on the memory.fact_type— forceknowledge,experience, ordecisioninstead of LLM classification. See Fact types.entities— pre-extracted entities to link explicitly.
Files
POST /files/commit accepts uploads
(PDF, DOCX, PPTX, XLSX, HTML, images). Documents are parsed — with OCR for
scanned pages and images — chunked, and committed through the same
extraction pipeline. Namespace directives and
commit configuration apply to file content the same way they apply to
text.
Steering extraction
Per-namespace configuration sets a commit mission, extraction mode, custom instructions, and chunk size. Directives add standing instructions that bias what extraction keeps and how it phrases facts.