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Why Omphalis, the big picture.

• Why Omphalis — Omphalis is a custodial center for understanding. It cleans source material, reveals its structure, adds precise marks, and helps you return to connections without replacing the original work.
• Why Omphalis exists — Omphalis exists to close the gap between saving something and understanding it. We save far more than we read, and screen reading is often shallow, so a backlog of half-understood pieces builds up.
• What Omphalis does with a piece — When you keep something, Omphalis works on it in four layers: Clean makes one readable page, Structure (Strata) shows its shape, Mark adds quiet notes, and Connection links pieces over time. None of them shrink the piece so you can skip it.
• How it is different from tools you already use — Read-later apps store what you save but do not help you understand it; note apps like Notion and Obsidian leave the structuring work to you; summarizers reduce a piece so you can skip it. Omphalis sits between the queue and the blank canvas and makes what you keep comprehensible.
• How to read this guide — This guide moves from concepts to the basics, to day-to-day use, to advanced control, and finally to real step-by-step scenarios. The single-item experience of Clean, Structure, and Mark is worth it from the very first piece.
• Visual glossary — The core vocabulary separates arrival, custody, structure, annotation, and connection. Use the Glossary for canonical definitions and links to deeper sections.