Hydra Archives

Hydra uses its own archive format to hold everything needed to merge records, build hierarchies and link sources and media to entities: the data, the rules that shape it, and the decisions made while reviewing it.

Warning

Everything here is in alpha and will very likely change, including where things are installed. Hydra will not drift from its principle: a modifiable, portable configuration travels with the data, with defaults provided and methods kept consistent.

An archive is a folder. hydra-ctl init <folder> creates one there from the built-in template.

case/
├── hydra.yaml                      the archive's name, id prefix and FtM schema hash
├── collections/                    your records
├── session/                        reserved; not used yet
└── .hydra/                         managed by hydra
    ├── sources/entries/            the sources your records cite
    ├── rules/                      positions and media rules
    ├── review/                     your review decisions (verdicts.yaml)
    ├── schema/                     the FollowTheMoney schema, params, direction and extension types
    ├── resources/                  icons and media
    ├── parsed/                     the last build
    └── cache/                      parsed config kept between runs

Records and collections and Sources cover the data. Config files covers hydra.yaml, the rules and the schema.

session/

session/ is reserved for a future feature. Nothing reads it yet: put records in collections/.

resources/

.hydra/resources/ holds the images that hints.yaml points at.

Defaults

Hydra ships generic defaults for the rule and schema files. Only change these if you want to set your own custom hierarchy; defaults shows which ones you have changed and restores them. It doesn't cover the FollowTheMoney schema in .hydra/schema/ftm/; see Config files.

The .hydra file

hydra-ctl pack turns an archive into one portable .hydra file: a zip of everything above, with a checksum for every file and the last build included. The same archive always packs to the same bytes, and the cache is left out.

hydra-ctl init case.hydra opens one into a folder. Commands that only read take the file directly.