Catalogs and discovery

Finding something in the corpus is a separate skill from evaluating it. Three discovery surfaces cover three needs: clients browse packages, authors query structure, and everyone reads the generated format reference.

Confirmation marks in parentheses, such as (S) or (I), follow the legend on the topic index.

Client discovery over the tool protocol

Clients that speak the tool protocol discover packages through three tools: one lists packages with signatures and coverage bounds, one searches by meaning across predicates, rules, and source fragments, and one runs structural queries with paging. The search step returns addresses — what to ask next — not answers. The applicability of a norm never follows from text similarity. Available in the public release (S).

Start at MCP tools for the tool shapes and paging envelopes.

Structural discovery with named questions

The structural query surface ships a catalog of named questions and checks. The six questions carry parameter lists, which is what selects them from the full listing (run from a source checkout):

Output

$ ./law query --list | grep -E '\(node|\(pkg|\(predicate|\(type'
anchors-of (node, pkg) — На какие закреплённые фрагменты опирается узел — акт, локатор и фрагмент каждого якоря.
imports-of (pkg) — Что импортирует пакет — имена импортированных пакетов и их закреплённые semanticHash.
links-of (node, pkg) — Все типизированные связи узла по отношению links — produces, reads, anchored, alias, subtype.
producers (predicate, pkg) — Кто производит предикат в пакете — правила с этой головой, их сила, полярность и якоря.
readers (predicate, pkg) — Кто читает предикат — литералы тел правил, норм и ограничений (головы исключены: их перечисляет producers); pkg может быть глобом, тогда видно чтение из других пакетов.
type-step (type, pkg) — Один шаг цепочки типов субъекта — alias или subtype от названного типа к цели; следующий шаг — тот же вопрос с полученным to и пакетом цели.

The descriptions are printed in Russian. In English, in listing order: anchors-of — the pinned fragments a node rests on (act, locator, fragment); imports-of — the packages a package imports and their pinned semanticHash; links-of — a node’s typed links (produces, reads, anchored, alias, subtype); producers — the rules that derive a predicate, with strength, polarity, and anchors; readers — the rule, norm, and constraint bodies that read a predicate (a glob in pkg shows reads from other packages); type-step — one alias-or-subtype step of a type chain. The full table is on the worked solutions page.

In practice: producers finds who derives a predicate, readers finds who consumes it (across packages when given a glob), type-step walks one alias-or-subtype step, and the *-of family reports anchors, imports, and typed links. A live listing shows 22 entries: these 6 questions and 16 lint checks that the audit command runs as its form section. The question catalog itself is the stable discovery surface (S). The runner ./law query requires a source checkout: it is absent from the public composition and needs the checkout launcher (see Before you start).

The structural layer offers equality and membership only — no arithmetic, ordering, recursion, or free negation — and every row carries the identity of the compiled node it came from. Start at the LawQL reference for relations, functions, and the inference layer.

The generated format reference

The schema catalog renders one page per format from the schema sources: packages, locks, profiles, imports, reviews, queries, and the rest. One caveat when reading it: the Versions column reflects only the schemaVersion field, while several format families — package formats, import formats, native formats, and alignment reports among them — carry their version in a format or descriptor field instead. Their versions are real and enforced; they are just invisible in that column. The per-format page body always shows the true identifier.

What to read next

• LawQL reference for the full query surface.
• MCP tools for client-side discovery.
• Schema catalog for every format in one place.
• Command-line reference for the query and audit commands.