Registers

A register is what you’re actually asking for. Every kind of record in Civil Memory - a site diary entry, a safety incident, a budget line, a supplier rating - is kept on a register. It is the same idea as the plant register, drawing register or NCR register a contractor already keeps: one kind of record, in one agreed format, kept current.

When you ask a question through Studio or Ask Demiton, you’re naming a register: “safety incidents,” “budget vs actual,” “site diaries.” You don’t need to know, or care, which system produced the underlying record. Every register has a published contract that says what one record on it holds.

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Why the register, not the system

Before this model existed, a request named the pipe that wrote the data, not the record it produced. That worked as long as one register had one writer. It broke as the platform grew for reasons that show up as real product limits if left unfixed:

• More than one system can feed the same register. If your organisation runs Business Central for one contract type and Xero for another, “job cost elements” should mean the same thing regardless of which ERP produced it. A request that names the writer instead of the record can’t express that.
• Delivery is a server decision, not a caller decision. Whether a fact is served from a cache, computed live, or read straight off a table shouldn’t change what you ask for.
• The name should describe the record, not the plumbing. “Safety incidents” is what you mean. The mechanism that got the incident into memory is an implementation detail.

A register is deliberately not the same thing as an ingest group - the pipe that writes to it. Keeping the two separate is what makes both problems solvable independently.

Registers are called shelves in the API

The API, the MCP tools and the Demiton app call a register a shelf. The shelves parameter on Ask Demiton takes register IDs such as site_diary, and the contract schema key is x-demiton-shelf-type. A few register IDs contain a colon - document_location:asset - while the published contract URL replaces it with --. The word differs; the thing is the same.

If you remember 'Capability'

Registers and ingest groups together replace what used to be a single “Capability” concept. Every capability-named thing was really either a record you ask for (now a register) or a pipe (now an ingest group, previously called a conduit). Nothing you built against the old name broke - it still resolves, just to more precise underlying vocabulary.

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Next steps

• Register catalog - every register, grouped by domain
• Register contracts - the fields, requiredness and an example record for each register
• Ingest groups - the pipe that fills a register
• Agents - agents read registers the same way Studio and Ask Demiton do
• How Civil Memory works - the record registers are drawn from