Knowledge Library Try Protos

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The Knowledge Library is Protos's institutional memory. Every decision, data point, and reference is captured here and linked to the design artifacts that used it — so nothing is ever lost between projects, teams, or people.

Set this up before using the Co-Engineer. The Co-Engineer draws on the Knowledge Library when creating schemas, filling data documents, and answering questions. The richer the library, the more grounded and traceable its output.

What Lives Here

Type	Examples
Academic literature	Papers, standards, patents — uploaded as PDF, DOCX, XLSX, CSV, TXT, Markdown, JSON, and common image formats up to 100 MB
Internal reports	Experimental summaries, design reviews, test reports
Decisions	Why a parameter value was chosen; why an approach was rejected
Experimental results	Test reports and datasets uploaded as files or captured as text notes
AI-surfaced connections	Co-Engineer surfaces relevant prior work as you design

Source Categories

Every document is automatically classified by where it came from, so you can tell a peer-reviewed paper apart from a forum thread at a glance. Each category has its own icon in the library table:

Category	What it means
Research	Peer-reviewed papers, standards, patents
Article	Articles and other published web writing
Web	General web pages
Forum	Forum and discussion threads
Datasheet	Manufacturer datasheets and spec tables
Uploaded	Files you uploaded directly
Memory	Knowledge notes you (or the Co-Engineer) captured as text
Model Run	Content generated from a model run
Conversation	Knowledge captured from a Co-Engineer conversation

Protos assigns a category on ingestion, and the owner can change it at any time: open the ⋯ row actions and use Set category (or select several rows to set the category in bulk).

Finding Knowledge

Open Knowledge from the sidebar.
Switch between views with the tabs at the top: List (the default flat, paginated view), Knowledge Graph, and Project Graph — see Traceability and Connections.
In the List view, narrow things down with the category filter chips (Research, Article, Web, …), each showing a count. Combine them with the tag filter and the search box.
If documents have been shared with you, Mine and Shared chips also appear so you can switch between your own documents and ones others shared. A marker on each shared row shows it came from someone else.
Use the search box to find items by title, folder name, or tag — it doesn't search document content or notes.
Click any item to see its full content, its source categories and tags, the sources that informed it, and what it is used by. From here you can also download the original file (or the extracted text, for conversation-sourced entries) and, for entries created from a Co-Engineer conversation, jump back to that conversation.

Tip: Before starting a new project or design iteration, browse the library for prior experiments and decisions in the same domain. Co-Engineer can also surface relevant entries automatically as you work on the canvas.

Adding to the Library

Upload a document

Click Add → Upload Document.
Choose a file — PDF, DOCX, Excel, CSV, TXT, images, and more. Up to 100 MB.
The title is auto-filled from the filename — edit it if needed.
Click Upload. Protos parses and chunks the content, making it available to the Co-Engineer.

Add a knowledge note

To capture a decision, insight, or observation as text:

Click Add → Add Knowledge.
Enter a Title and the Content.
Click Save Knowledge.

Upload a folder

For bulk ingestion of many files at once:

Click Add → Upload Folder.
Select a folder — Protos processes the files in the background. Batches are capped at 100 MB and 500 files maximum.

Managing documents and folders

Use the ⋯ menu on any document or folder row to Rename, Set category, or Delete it. From a document's detail page you can also edit its title inline and edit the content directly for knowledge notes. (Tags are edited from the document's row in the library table — see Tags.)

Traceability and Connections

When the Co-Engineer creates or updates a data document using information from the Knowledge Library, it records which specific chunks of which documents it drew on. This means you can see exactly where a field value came from — not just "the Co-Engineer said so" but the specific source passage, with a citation that links straight back to it.

Field value in data document
  └── Knowledge Library chunk
        └── Original uploaded document (paper, report, note)

Used by

Each document's detail page has a Used by panel — the reverse of a citation. It lists the schemas, data documents, models, and canvases that were built from that document, so you can see the downstream impact of a source before you change or remove it. For a document that came from a Co-Engineer conversation, this panel is instead titled "Modified in this conversation" and lists what was created or edited during that chat.

Graph views

Two graph views let you explore these relationships visually:

Knowledge Graph — how your documents and the assets that cite them connect across the library.
Project Graph — the same connections scoped to a single project.

This chain is preserved permanently — even if team members leave or projects are archived.

Knowledge documents are private to you by default, and can be shared read-only with other people — no one you share with can edit or delete them. There are two ways a document gets shared:

Directly — open a document and use its Share dialog to grant read access to specific people, teams, or an email domain (the same audiences as everywhere else in Protos).
Automatically, with the work built on it — when you share a project or an asset (schema, data document, model, or canvas), Protos additively shares the Knowledge Library documents that asset cites, so your collaborator can open and reason over the same sources.

Shared documents appear in the recipient's library under the Shared filter, marked with a "shared with you" indicator. Access is always evaluated live, so revoking a share takes effect immediately. See Collaboration & Sharing for how sharing works across Protos.

Best Practices

Capture decisions as they're made, not retrospectively. The rationale is clearest in the moment and becomes harder to reconstruct over time.
Link papers to specific claims, not just to the paper itself. Trace is only useful if it points to the exact piece of evidence that informed a decision.
Use descriptive titles and tags so documents are easy to find — search matches titles, folder names, and tags (not document content), and tags also let you group documents across categories.
Keep categories aligned with how you work: adjust a document's category with Set category whenever a different one fits your workflow better, so filters and the graph stay meaningful.
Review the library at project kickoff: search for prior experiments and decisions before starting new work. Don't repeat work that's already been done.