osFoundry / Platform
Notes — Research
Card-based view to collect sources, quotes and highlights as you research a topic.
What it is
Notes — Research is a card-based workspace view for gathering the raw material of a research topic in one place. Instead of one long document, each finding lives on its own card: a source you want to remember, a quote you pulled from it, a highlight worth keeping. As you read across articles, docs, and pages, you drop each piece onto a card and keep moving, so the collection grows while your reading flow stays unbroken. The card layout lets you see everything you have collected at a glance rather than scrolling through a wall of pasted text.
Because it runs inside osFoundry, a bring-your-own-key desktop workspace, your research notes sit in the same place as your chat, agents, apps, and other knowledge. That matters for two reasons. First, the material you collect stays on your device by default rather than living in someone else's cloud account, which is what you want when your notes contain other people's work, half-formed ideas, or anything you would not paste into a third-party service. Second, the sources and quotes you gather are already in the workspace where you talk to models, so the same body of evidence you assembled by hand is close to the tools you use to reason over it — with no per-seat fee and no reseller markup on the models you run, since you connect your own keys.
The point of a card view is separation before synthesis. Early research is messy: you do not yet know which quote will matter or how the sources relate. Keeping each source, quote, and highlight as a discrete, movable card lets you collect widely first and impose structure later, rather than forcing every note into an outline you have not figured out yet. When you are ready to write, the cards are your evidence base — each one still tied to where it came from.
Key capabilities
- Card-based view where each source, quote, or highlight becomes its own movable card you can see at a glance
- Collect material as you read without breaking flow — capture a finding, keep going, organize later
- Runs in osFoundry's desktop workspace, so notes live beside your chat, agents, apps, and knowledge
- Local-first and privacy-preserving: your collected sources and quotes can stay on your device by default
- BYOK with no per-seat fees — the same models you run over your research use your own API keys, no reseller markup
Use cases
- Analyst: builds a topic dossier by dropping each report's key quote onto its own card, keeping the source link with every claim
- Writer: collects highlights from a dozen articles as separate cards, then arranges them into an argument once the evidence is in
- Founder doing market research: gathers competitor pages, pricing quotes, and product notes as cards on a private, on-device board
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from just taking notes in a document?
A document forces everything into one linear flow before you know how the pieces relate. Notes — Research keeps each source, quote, and highlight as a separate card, so you can collect widely first and arrange the material into structure later, rather than committing to an outline while you are still gathering.
Where are my research notes stored?
osFoundry is a local-first desktop workspace, so your collected notes can stay on your device by default rather than in a third-party cloud account. That is intentional for research material — sources, quotes, and highlights you would not want to hand to an outside service.
Can I use AI models on the sources I collect?
Your research notes live in the same osFoundry workspace as your chat and agents, so the evidence you assemble by hand is already alongside the models you run. osFoundry is bring-your-own-key, meaning you connect your own API keys — local, cloud, or self-hosted models — with no per-seat fee and no markup from us.