Portability

Interface is designed so that the artefacts it produces — knowledge structures, inference records, evaluation outputs, frameworks, annotations — can travel. They exist in formats that other tools can read, without requiring Interface to interpret them. This is not a feature; it is a design constraint applied from the start. Artefacts produced in a proprietary format that only Interface can open are not portable — they are hosted. The distinction matters the moment you need to move, integrate with another system, or leave.

The open systems tradition provides the intellectual basis. Berners-Lee's commitment to the open web established that interoperability is a choice, not a technical necessity. Zittrain's account of generativity documents what is lost when closed systems displace open ones: the ability to innovate from the edges without permission from the centre. GDPR Article 20 establishes data portability as a legal right. The EU Digital Markets Act imposes interoperability obligations on platforms that accumulate enough market power to make switching genuinely costly — recognition that market mechanisms alone cannot sustain portability when incumbents' interests systematically favour lock-in.

Heersmink's integration dimensions are relevant here in a specific way: portability is one of the conditions under which an artefact is genuinely integrated into a cognitive system rather than merely stored by a platform. A knowledge base you can't export without losing structure isn't truly part of your cognitive architecture — it belongs to the platform. Interface exports in open formats because the knowledge it holds should remain part of the user's cognitive infrastructure, regardless of what tool is managing it at any given time.