Record Harm Ontology

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 v4.0 decision — v3.0 went to the prime-set correction described below.

Prime harms

Six, since v3.0. rho:Suppression was a composite until then, said to build upon rho:Omission — a category error on the ontology's own definitions, since nothing is excluded from a suppressed record: it is complete, unmodified and merely out of reach. It was promoted because it is also the only prime attacking rho:Accessibility, which no prime had targeted at all; the composite had been hung off omission for want of anywhere else to attach.

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

Where a record lives

Added in v3.1. A record is borne by an agent — rho:bearer — and that one property carries the whole distinction between a record held inside an agent (a memory, a belief, a private ledger: one individual bearer) and one held inside a community (a register, an archive: many bearers, or a single collective bearer). Records can also contain records, via rho:hasElement, so a community's register is a record in its own right rather than a bag of them.

The distinction needed no new harm. Every case lands on a prime already there:

So location is a property of the record, not a dimension of harm. What it does make expressible for the first time is self-directed harm — a HarmEvent whose perpetrator is also the bearer of the record it harms. Repression is suppression with the perpetrator inside.

Two boundaries are deliberate. A private memory is not a suppressed record: suppression means access was severed from someone who would otherwise have had it, which is a change in the configuration, not the configuration itself. And an agent who witnesses something and records nothing harms no record, because there is no record — pure non-creation sits outside the vocabulary.

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 →

@misc{recordharmontology2026,
  title   = {Record Harm Ontology: A Formal Model of Ontological Attacks on Information},
  author  = {Hinchley, Ron},
  year    = {2026},
  version = {3.1},
  url     = {https://epistemic-ontology.net/record-harm}
}