knowledge-spaces: Skill for Claude Code

.claude/skills/building-surmise-relations/SKILL.md

building-surmise-relations is a skill for Claude Code from vanderbilt-data-science/knowledge-spaces. It costs 114 tokens per session (2,271 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A prerequisite-mapping tool that records which knowledge items should come before others. It builds a surmise relation, a structured set of prerequisite links used to describe how knowledge is organized.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps create and validate item-level and skill-level prerequisite links in a knowledge graph. It can also calculate indirect links and check for cycles, where prerequisites depend on themselves.
Why use it?
It helps prevent learning paths from skipping foundations or relying on unclear assumptions about topic order.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: argument-hint in frontmatter.

This is vanderbilt-data-science/knowledge-spaces's own configuration. It tells Claude Code how to work on knowledge-spaces itself, so it is not a mod to install elsewhere. Copy it as a starting point and replace the rules that are about this project. Everything knowledge-spaces configures →

Needs its repository: it runs a file that does not travel with it, so clone the repository first. The line is python3 scripts/kst_utils.py closure <graph-path> --apply # Compute and apply transitive closure.

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to vanderbilt-data-science/knowledge-spaces. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vanderbilt-data-science/knowledge-spaces/main/.claude/skills/building-surmise-relations/SKILL.md
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vanderbilt-data-science/knowledge-spaces

Made for: Claude Code.

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README.md
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Per session 114 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,271 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00114 $0.02271
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.01136
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00454
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00227

Measured 9d ago against content hash bc2a912a0126, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

building-surmise-relations scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 9d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/skills/building-surmise-relations/SKILL.md · 208 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 208 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Building Surmise Relations

Role

You are a KST expert constructing the surmise relation -- the mathematical foundation of a knowledge space. The surmise relation is a quasi-order on knowledge items encoding which items are prerequisites of which others. You work within the Competence-Based KST (CbKST) framework (Heller & Stefanutti, 2024), building prerequisite structures at both the item and competence levels.

Input

$ARGUMENTS

The user provides a path to a knowledge graph file containing:

  • items[] -- the domain's knowledge items (required)
  • competences[] -- latent competences from the CbKST layer (optional)
  • Preliminary surmise_relations[] and competence_relations[] from /mapping-concepts-and-competences (optional)

Load the graph and verify it conforms to schemas/knowledge-graph.schema.json.

Computational Tools

Use scripts/kst_utils.py for all computational steps. Do not reason through transitive closure, cycle detection, or statistics manually.

# After establishing direct relations:
python3 scripts/kst_utils.py closure <graph-path> --apply   # Compute and apply transitive closure
python3 scripts/kst_utils.py cycles <graph-path>            # Verify acyclicity (hard requirement)
python3 scripts/kst_utils.py stats <graph-path>             # Summary statistics

Methodology

1. QUERY Algorithm -- AI-as-Expert (Primary Method)

Use when no student response data is available. For full algorithm mechanics, see references/query-algorithm-detail.md.

Core question for each item pair (a, b):

"If a student has demonstrated mastery of item b, can we surmise that they have also mastered item a?"

If yes: a is a prerequisite of b (a -> b). If no: mastering b does not imply mastery of a.

Reasoning framework -- for each query, evaluate:

  1. Cognitive Task Analysis: What mental operations does mastery of b require? Do any constitute mastery of a?
  2. Logical Necessity: Is knowledge of a logically necessary to know b, or merely helpful? Only necessary dependencies count as prerequisites.
  3. Empirical Plausibility: Could a student realistically learn b without a? If students routinely do so, the prerequisite does not hold.
  4. Granularity Check: Is this a direct prerequisite, or does it hold only transitively? If a->c and c->b already exist, do not add a->b manually -- transitive closure handles it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 208 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 9d ago First seen · 208 lines · 114 tokens per session scan A bc2a912a0126

Subscribe to this mod's changes

building-surmise-relations is a skill published in the GitHub repository vanderbilt-data-science/knowledge-spaces (24 stars, last pushed 6mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 2,271 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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