A repository is a structured, versioned collection of artifacts under governance.
Secondary intension
Something is a repository when it has all of:
- Structure: artifacts are organized by a declared scheme (not just accumulated)
- Versioning: the history of changes is preserved and navigable
- Governance: there are rules about what can be added, changed, or removed, and who decides
Distinguished from
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Endeavor: the repository is the artifact; the endeavor is the activity. An endeavor produces and maintains a repository. A repository can outlive the endeavor that created it (an archive).
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Vault: an Obsidian-specific term for a directory of markdown files managed by Obsidian. A vault is one possible implementation of a repository’s content layer.
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Project: a project is a bounded effort; a repository is a persistent artifact. Projects operate on the repository; the repository persists across projects.
In the semiotic framework
A repository is the material carrier of a semiotic system — the collection of signs (files), their relations (links, predicates, directory structure), and their governance (policies, specifications). The predicate graph is the repository’s semantic structure; the file system is its syntactic structure; specifications are its pragmatic structure.