Ingest groups
An ingest group is how a fact actually gets recorded. Every connector that reads from your ERP, every field-ops harvester, every document extraction, and every computed reconciliation writes into Civil Memory through an ingest group. It’s the pipe - as distinct from the shelf, which is the product the pipe fills.
What travels with an ingest group
Section titled “What travels with an ingest group”An ingest group is more than a data path. It’s the single place the platform records:
- Entitlement - which tier, and which of your organisation’s permissions, are required for this data to flow at all
- Provenance - where the fact came from, stamped on every record it writes
- Routing - which shelf, or shelves, it feeds
Because these properties live on the ingest group rather than scattered across individual writes, a fact’s origin and the rules that governed it are never ambiguous after the fact.
One shelf, several ingest groups
Section titled “One shelf, several ingest groups”A shelf can be filled by more than one ingest group. A shelf has one owner ingest group - the primary source, which sets the shared rules other contributors must agree to - and can have any number of contributor ingest groups layering additional facts on top. A document-extraction pipeline can, for instance, backfill a shelf that a structured form submission normally owns. When you ask for that shelf, you see facts from every ingest group that feeds it, not just the owner.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- Shelves - the product an ingest group fills
- Connectors - the systems most ingest groups read from
- Agents - producer agents write to memory the same way an ingest group does