refract-org/refract

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Refract

Open infrastructure for agent-readable knowledge change. Turns source histories into replayable semantic change events.

Turn document histories into claim-state timelines.

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v0.5.0+: Events now carry 6 deterministic enrichment fields (editMagnitude, directionSignal, certaintyProfile, etc.) — byte-reproducible, no model.

What does it do?

Given a Wikipedia page, Refract produces a structured event stream showing what changed, when, and how — every sentence that appeared, was removed, or was modified; every citation that shifted; every revert and edit cluster.

npx @refract-org/cli analyze "Climate change" --brief

Output:

sentence_first_seen  | 2026-01-15 | "Climate change has led to increased frequency of extreme weather events."
sentence_modified    | 2026-03-02 | "Climate change has intensified..." (edit magnitude: 0.31)
citation_added       | 2026-03-02 | [IPCC AR6 Report] → paragraph 4
sentence_removed     | 2026-04-10 | "Some researchers dispute..." (reverted next edit)
revert               | 2026-04-11 | Full revert of 2026-04-10 edit (edit cluster: 3 edits in 2h)

<p align="center" <img src="assets/refract-demo.gif" alt="Refract CLI analyzing a Wikipedia page" width="700" style="border-radius: 8px;" </p

No model. No API. Byte-reproducible — the same source produces the same events every time.

Refract ingests versioned sources (MediaWiki, text files), computes structural and semantic change events, tracks claims and citations across time, and emits structured provenance data that downstream systems can query, replay, and audit.

Works on any versioned text source: Wikipedia, regulatory documents, clinical guidelines, trial registries, policy archives, and legal texts. Refract replays how a claim changed over time. Downstream systems — like NextConsensus — decide what that history means.

A vector search tells you what's in the current document. Refract tells you when it got there, what it replaced, and whether it survived.

Most knowledge systems answer what does this source say now? Refract helps answer: what changed, when, where, and what did the record say at a specific point in time?

Built and maintained by NextConsensus and Kanav Jain. Domain-neutral — Refract observes change, applications interpret relevance.