Kafka topic
A named, ordered, partitioned log of events in the Kafka messaging system. Producers publish to topics; consumer groups consume from them. Topics are the fundamental unit of data flow in the cognitive bus, organized into tiered namespaces (telemetry.*, cognition.*, memory.*, selfmod.*).
A Kafka topic is the basic building block of the cognitive bus architecture. Each topic is a durable, ordered sequence of events partitioned for parallel processing. Producers append to the end; consumers read from any offset and maintain their position independently. In the Cognitive Substrate, topics are organized into semantic namespaces that reflect their role in the cognitive pipeline: telemetry.* topics carry raw infrastructure signals, cognition.* topics carry processed operational intelligence, memory.* topics carry memory lifecycle events, and selfmod.* topics carry self-modification proposals and outcomes. Topics differ in their storage configuration - diskless vs. local disk - based on their volume and retention requirements. The partitioning strategy for each topic determines how load is distributed across consumer replicas and how ordering guarantees apply to related events.