EpistemicOntology

Record Harm Ontology

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.

v2.3OWL 2 DLSKOSSHACL

Downloads

The namespace IRI content-negotiates: Accept: text/html returns this page, any RDF media type returns the Turtle. Files are also served directly, with CORS enabled so browser-based tooling can fetch them.

ResourceFileTypeSize
Ontology record-harm-ontology.ttl text/turtle 28.5 kB
SHACL shapes record-harm-shapes.ttl text/turtle 5.1 kB
Example events example-harm-events.ttl text/turtle 5.8 kB 
curl -H "Accept: text/turtle" https://epistemic-ontology.net/record-harm

Namespace

@prefix rho: <https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record-harm#> .

A hash namespace: dereferencing any term — for example …/record-harm#Destruction — returns the whole ontology document.

Migration note. This vocabulary was drafted under the placeholder http://example.org/record-harm-ontology#. The copies served here are rewritten to the permanent base at staging time, and the build fails if any example.org IRI survives. Adopting the permanent base in the source repository is that ontology's own v3.0 decision.

Prime harms

Term Meaning
rho:Destruction Annihilation of the record — removes its existence.
rho:Fabrication Creation of a record that never legitimately existed.
rho:Alteration Modification of a genuine record's content or metadata.
rho:Omission Deliberate exclusion of elements that should be present.
rho:Denial Refusing to acknowledge a record's existence or validity.

Composite harms

Built from primes via rho:buildsUpon — rho:Repudiation, for instance, builds upon rho:Denial and rho:Fabrication. Composite membership is reasoner-derivable: any harm with a buildsUpon edge. Note that buildsUpon is presupposition, not subsumption; transitivity was dropped deliberately to stay inside OWL 2 DL.

Layers

Term Meaning
rho:RecordHarm The harm-type taxonomy (Prime / Composite).
rho:HarmEvent A specific occurrence against a real record — date, perpetrator, severity.
rho:HarmPattern A recurring bundle of co-occurring harms, such as a cover-up.
rho:RecordAspect SKOS scheme of attacked aspects: existence, authenticity, integrity, accessibility, context, trustworthiness.

Relation to the Record Ontology

The two vocabularies are two readings of the same web, and the translation between them is written out in full as the harm dictionary in ROOT.md §18.

Record-harm's primes are act-shaped — what a perpetrator does to an artifact. The Record Ontology's cuts are warrant-shaped — where in the web the incoherence lands. The spine of the dictionary is a single claim:

Every prime harm is a legitimate web operation with its escalation record removed.

Puncturing is a storage decision; destruction is the non-regenerable residue lost. Supposition is worn openly; fabrication is the pretender transmitting unearned warrant. Retraction appends a new moment; alteration rewrites an old one. A stub is a skip that became a record; omission is the skip left unrecorded. Exorcism withdraws standing by a verdict; denial refuses standing without one. The act was never the harm — concealment is.

That is also why both survive. This web computes the incoherence; record-harm names the act and the actor. A HarmEvent has a perpetrator, a date and a severity — attribution content a court or an archive genuinely needs, and which the Record Ontology deliberately refuses to compute: there, harm is detected, never charged.

Read the post on the harm dictionary →

Cite

Cite the namespace IRI, not a file path: the IRI is the permanent identifier and will keep resolving as serializations change. 

@misc{recordharmontology2026,
  title   = {Record Harm Ontology: A Formal Model of Ontological Attacks on Information},
  author  = {Hinchley, Ron},
  year    = {2026},
  version = {2.3},
  url     = {https://epistemic-ontology.net/record-harm}
}