About Ingence#

Ingence is a read-only indexing and inference engine and local Dashboard for exploring scientific filesystems: it surveys what is there, and proposes how files relate using a Dictionary and a Rulebook you can read and edit.

It never changes the files it reads. Every conclusion names the rule that made it.

How it runs#

Ingence runs entirely on your computer. No conclusion is reached by a language model or an outside service. It needs no account, no API key and no network connection, collects no telemetry, and sends none of your data anywhere. It fetches a public archive’s file list, or a pack file from a web address, only when you ask it to.

Who makes it#

Andrew Bazley wrote Ingence and maintains it.

Who supports it#

Ingence’s development is supported by the Astera Institute through the Hidden Science Competition.

The license#

The code, and the documentation that ships with it, are released under the MIT license. Copyright (c) 2026 Andrew Bazley. Synthetic datasets and de-identified benchmark data, when they are released, are planned under CC0 1.0, and the technical report under CC BY 4.0 (Science). The software Ingence depends on keeps its own licenses, listed in the file NOTICE in the source.

How mature it is#

Ingence 0.3.0 is a pre-alpha. It runs from start to finish and is changed often.

What Ingence produces are proposals and readings, not scientific conclusions. What has and has not been measured is on What the evaluation says. What 0.3 contains is on What’s new in 0.3.

Send feedback to hello@ingence.org (Community).

How to cite it#

Cite the version you used: ingence --version prints it. A DOI, a permanent identifier for the software, will be added when the software is archived. Until then, cite ingence.org and the version.

How Ingence was made#

Ingence and its documentation were written by Andrew Bazley with the help of AI coding assistants. He reviewed the work and is responsible for it.

Where to go next#

  • Science: the technical report, how Ingence is evaluated, and the datasets planned.

  • Community: where to ask, report a problem and contribute.

  • Who it is for: pages for researchers, laboratory heads and research IT.