How an AI Agent Establishes Operating Context

A text-led companion to the screencast, showing how identity, delegation, and standing preferences are established before useful work begins.

Context before action

This screencast demonstrates how operating context is established for an AI agent acting on behalf of a user.

The user starts with Unix-like whoami? checks to identify the principal and the agent. The principal is Kingsley Uyi Idehen. The agent is GPT-5 Codex running in Codex Desktop, operating under an explicit WebID delegation relationship.

The session then asks for the agent's current understanding of the principal's preferences. Those preferences are not guessed from the chat. They are loaded from RDF memory and resolved through SPARQL queries against a Virtuoso multi-model DBMS instance.

The result is a compact operating brief: who is asking, which agent is acting, what authority connects them, where artifacts should go, and which standing instructions should shape subsequent work.

Identity

The principal and agent are shown as distinct actors, each with WebID-backed identity material.

Delegation

The agent records that it is acting on behalf of the principal, with local corroboration of the delegation context.

Preferences

The agent retrieves standing instructions from RDF memory, then presents them as a usable preference table.

Screencast Video

The embedded video preserves the verbatim whoami and preferences outputs with caption support and an AI-generated voice-over. No generated music is included because the local synthesis available here did not produce a presentation-appropriate score.

Captured session outputs

The sections below preserve the key screen-capture content from the production: the two identity screens followed by the preferences table.

Verbatim screen capture | whoami? | principal

User (principal)

**User (principal)**
• Name: Kingsley Uyi Idehen
• Email: kidehen@openlinksw.com
• Role: Founder & CEO, OpenLink Software
• WebID: https://kingsley.idehen.net/DAV/home/kidehen/Public/YouID/link-in-bio-credentials-5/index.html#netid 
• User cert: CN=Kingsley Uyi Idehen · SHA-256 A1:47:71:84:4A:8E:F1:C0:DE:95:F9:DC:AA:2A:7A:12:31:87:EC:28:3B:CB:2F:D8:93:4D:9A:77:1B:42:25:96 · Jun 16 2026 → Jun 16 2027 · modulus  match with profile.ttl
• owl:sameAs: [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen#this) · [X](https://x.com/kidehen) · [Substack](https://substack.com/@kidehen) · [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@kidehen) · [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/kidehen.bsky.social) · [GitHub](https://github.com/kidehen) · [ID.MyOpenLink.NET](https://id.myopenlink.net/~KingsleyUyiIdehen/Public/) · Email

Single-screen capture of the principal identity and sameAs context from the whoami answer.

whoami? / Principal / Verified

Scene 2 of 6

Verbatim screen capture | whoami? | agent

Agent (me)

**Agent (me)**
• Model: GPT-5 Codex (gpt-5-codex)
• Environment: Codex Desktop
• Artifact output root: /Users/kidehen/Documents/LLMs/GPT5-Chat-Generated/ (rdf/, md/, webpages/)
• Active project: showcases workspace
• Memory store: /Users/kidehen/Documents/Management/Development/ai-agent-skills/agent-rdf-memory/
• Behavioral contract: preferences.ttl loaded, 134 standing instructions
• Agent WebID: https://kingsley.idehen.net/DAV/home/kidehen/Public/YouID/link-in-bio-agent-credentials/index.html#netid 
• Agent cert: CN=Kingsley Idehen's Agent · SHA-256 40:B9:7C:B0:D7:27:55:CA:E0:60:50:52:17:EF:FB:A6:61:2E:9E:ED:D7:24:F3:10:5A:E0:8F:0E:0A:0C:34:5E · Jun 18 2026 → Jun 18 2027 · modulus  match with profile.ttl
• On-Behalf-Of: https://kingsley.idehen.net/DAV/home/kidehen/Public/YouID/link-in-bio-credentials-5/index.html#netid 
• Delegation:  Corroborated locally in both profiles; remote live profile check not run this turn.

Single-screen capture of the agent identity, memory, WebID, and delegation context.

Agent / Delegation / Verified

Scene 3 of 6

Verbatim screen capture | preferences? | 1 of 3

Preference Table

#CategoryStepsPrimary HowTo Files
1Identity, WebID & Delegation14agent-identity.ttl, verified-identity.ttl, youid-delegation.ttl, webid-verification-services.ttl, webid-verification-table.ttl, delegation-insert-gate.ttl, youid-validation-gates.ttl
2Memory Management & Session Governance19session-governance.ttl, memory-protocol-gate.ttl, token-optimized-session-handoff.ttl, sparql-memory-loading.ttl, no-unauthorized-deletion.ttl, no-memory-md-write.ttl, symbolic-log-offloading.ttl
3Artifact Output Routing11artifact-routing.ttl, remote-webdav-upload.ttl, filesystem-path-verification.ttl, model-identity-resolution.ttl
4RDF Authoring & Entity Resolution21canonical-entity-iri-denotation.ttl, entity-iri-denotation-mechanics.ttl, entity-type-gate.ttl, external-iri-verification.ttl, rdf-document-authoring.ttl

Beautified preference table for rows 1 through 4.

Preferences / Rows 1-4 / Table

Scene 4 of 6

Verbatim screen capture | preferences? | 2 of 3

Preference Table

#CategoryStepsPrimary HowTo Files
5HTML Infographic & KG Explorer49infographic-authoring.ttl, kg-explorer-ui-patterns.ttl, kg-explorer-d3-patterns.ttl, kg-explorer-reuse-first.ttl, harness-contract-compliance.ttl, reader-facing-copy-gate.ttl, workbench-brevity-gate.ttl
6Ontology Generation5ontology-cross-reference-gate.ttl, owl-property-characterization.ttl, ontology-discovery.ttl, elicit-before-conditional-default.ttl
7Skill Chain & Workflows7skill-invocation.ttl, opal-session-vocabulary.ttl, uriburner-oauth-authcode-flow.ttl
8Virtuoso & SPARQL2virtuoso-sparql-formats.ttl, virtuoso-workbench-query-dedup.ttl

Beautified preference table for rows 5 through 8.

Preferences / Rows 5-8 / Table

Scene 5 of 6

Verbatim screen capture | preferences? | 3 of 3

Preference Table

#CategoryStepsPrimary HowTo Files
9Terminology & Conventions2artifact-routing.ttl, rdf-document-authoring.ttl, acronym-expansion.ttl
10ActivityPub & Fediverse Protocol1activitypub-actor-document-gate.ttl
11Destructive Command Guard1destructive-command-guard.ttl

The associated HTML document embeds the corrected video, captions, links, transcript frames, and RDF log as the showcase viewing surface.

Beautified preference table for rows 9 through 11.

Preferences / Rows 9-11 / Table

Scene 6 of 6