A namespace for formal vocabularies
A small, curated namespace for OWL 2 DL and SKOS vocabularies that model how information is structured, warranted, and damaged. Every term has a stable, dereferenceable IRI.
Browse the ontologies Read the blog
https://epistemic-ontology.net/
Each is dereferenceable: the namespace IRI returns human documentation or
machine RDF according to the Accept header.
https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record#
A domain-neutral ontology of warranted record-structure — how agents warrant, compose, ground and revise records. It models the connective grammar of knowledge, not the things known.
https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/arith#
The formal object face, at representative scope: arithmetic operations in a definitional hierarchy bottoming at Peano, and expressions as formal Records composed of Records. A companion to the Record Ontology — attached, never absorbed.
https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record-harm#
A taxonomy of the ways an informational record can be damaged — prime harms (destruction, fabrication, alteration, omission, denial) and the composites built upon them — with SKOS vocabularies, SHACL validation and an event layer for specific occurrences.
One core vocabulary, one companion that plugs into it, and one sibling that reads the same web from the other side.
Why the Record Ontology never had an example.org placeholder, what the redirect chain under this site actually does, and why a 303 is the right answer to a namespace IRI.
v0.5.0 removed a class rather than adding one. What carries the carrier turned out to be the wrong question — the regress halts in a warrant, not in a thing, and the cogito is a pattern rather than a class.
v0.6.0 added one datatype property and a discipline that goes with it. Formal warrant is a claim, not a credential: run the description or hold the record testimonially — and be honest about which.
A handful of carefully engineered, inter-operable vocabularies, each published at a permanent address so it can be cited, imported and dereferenced for decades. Vocabularies here favour OWL 2 DL where reasoning matters, SKOS where a controlled vocabulary is enough, and SHACL for closed-world validation.
Two commitments shape everything published under this namespace:
IRIs are permanent from birth. No example.org placeholder that has to be
migrated later, taking every downstream adopter with it. The cost of that lesson
is visible on this very site — the Record Harm Ontology is still served through a
rewrite because it was drafted under a placeholder, while the Record Ontology,
born at its final address, is byte-identical to its source.
Documentation and RDF live at the same address. Every namespace IRI content-negotiates: a browser gets a page, a reasoner gets Turtle, and the fragment identifiers resolve client-side out of one document.
