Application-profile ontology

WEFT

An open knowledge vault even your AI agent can read.

WEFT maps atomic notes, typed relations, provenance and citations into a readable graph structure.

For human-curated vaults. For machine-readable reasoning.

Reuses: SKOS · DCTERMS · PROV-O · CiTO
Serializes: Turtle · JSON-LD
License: CC BY 4.0

Draft interface. Content and relation terms are provisional until the specification is locked.

A human-curated vault, typed and provenance-aware, one reading path highlighted.

Pan · zoom · select

The ontology schema (T-Box). Boxes are classes, amber arrows are properties (domain to target), violet arrows are provenance. Click any node to verify its exact mappings and contracts.

01 — Foundations

Namespaces#

WEFT is an application profile. It binds to a fixed set of established vocabularies and mints terms under the vault: namespace only as rdfs:subPropertyOf a real standard term.

Prefix	Namespace IRI	Role
vault:	https://w3id.org/weft/…	The application profile terms
skos:	http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#	Concepts, hierarchy, association
dcterms:	http://purl.org/dc/terms/	Composition, time, subject
prov:	http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#	Provenance, epistemic status
cito:	http://purl.org/spar/cito/	Active, directed citation relations
schema:	https://schema.org/	Projects, creative works, code

02 — Vocabulary

Classes#

Each note carries two rdf:type assertions, one for the file artifact (foaf:Document) and one for the meaning it bears (skos:Concept). The vault as a whole is exactly one skos:ConceptScheme.

Vault class	Maps to	Description
Knowledge atom	skos:Concept	The base unit of the knowledge layer, domain and range of almost every relation. Its filename is the prefLabel, its aliases the altLabel.
MOC	skos:Collection	A curated, ordered collection of concepts, the thematic map of one domain. An index, not a parent concept.
Literature	bibo:Document	An annotated academic source, the object of supports and cites.
Project Overview	schema:Project	Mission control of a project and collection of its knowledge documents.
Academic writing	schema:CreativeWork	A manuscript or paper, anchored to a project as a workstream.
Steering document	foaf:Document + prov:Plan	A governing document. Rule-setting ones are also prov:Plan.
Code repository	schema:SoftwareSourceCode	An external boundary entity that holds the volatile source of truth.
Vault	skos:ConceptScheme	The whole vault, exactly one scheme. Its top concepts are the domain spikes.

Term card

vault:KnowledgeAtoma skos:Concept

The atomic note, one concept per note. It is the file artifact (foaf:Document) and the meaning it bears (skos:Concept) at once. Its filename is the skos:prefLabel, its frontmatter aliases are skos:altLabel.

subClassOf: skos:Concept
in scheme: vault:VaultScheme
example: [[Semantic Markdown]]

03 — The core

Relations & navigation contracts#

The heart of WEFT. Where SKOS only states that two concepts are associated, WEFT uses active, directed predicates and pairs each one with a navigation contract, an explicit statement of what the edge licenses the agent to do.

:ThisNote — cito:usesMethodIn → :ThatNote

Relation	Predicate	Navigation contract
specializes / generalizes	skos:narrower	Climb for abstraction, descend for detail. Transitive for scope.
is-part-of / comprises	dcterms:isPartOf	Assemble the whole from its parts. Not a definition or parent link.
is-about	schema:about	Follow a document to the concepts it treats, reverse to find documents on a concept. The most common conceptual edge.
builds-on	vault:buildsOn	Read prerequisites first. Acyclic, sets the learning order.
extends	cito:extends	Follow to the elaboration of an idea. The origin stays valid.
supports	cito:supports	Cite as evidence, treat the target as warrant, not as a definition.
disagrees-with	cito:disagreesWith	Surface the tension, do not merge. Present both sides.
critiques	cito:critiques	Follow to a critical engagement. The target is evaluated, not endorsed.
uses-method-in	cito:usesMethodIn	Follow to where a concept's method is applied, to operationalize it.
enables	vault:enables	Follow from a foundation to the capability it makes possible.
cites	cito:cites	A bibliographic reference without a finer role. Weaker than supports.
related (fallback)	skos:related	Weak, untyped proximity. Last resort, prefer a typed predicate.

Property card

cito:supportsowl:ObjectProperty

A source backs a claim made in the subject note. Directed and role-bearing, unlike skos:related, reusing the established CiTO term.

domain: skos:Concept
range: bibo:Document
inverse: cito:isSupportedBy
dataview: supports::

Navigation contract

When the agent needs evidence for a claim in the subject note, it may traverse this edge to a citable source and treat the target as warrant. It must not treat the target as a definition or a parent concept.

Serialized

@prefix cito: <http://purl.org/spar/cito/> .

:epistemic-infrastructure
    cito:supports        :thaller-2021 ;
    vault:buildsOn        :context-engineering ;
    vault:epistemicStatus "befund" .

04 — Trust

States & provenance#

Every typed edge is a reified prov:Entity. The agent calibrates its reasoning on the edge's epistemic status instead of trusting unconfirmed suggestions.

hypothese

LLM-proposed, not yet human-confirmed. The agent discounts it when reasoning.

befund

A human-confirmed finding, safe to reason on.

diagnose

A confirmed inconsistency or tension, surfaced rather than hidden.

Status migration is modelled by versioning, not overwriting. The hypothesis version and the finding version are two prov:Entity linked through prov:wasRevisionOf, so every edge stays a verifiable link in the reference chain.

05 — Guarantees

Consistency conditions#

Deterministically checkable, independent of the effectiveness hypothesis. Realized as a pipeline step in the exporter, expressible as SHACL shapes.

C1Acyclicity of directed hierarchical relations, tested as a DAG over the transitive closure. A cycle is a diagnose finding.
C2Hierarchy disjoint from association. No pair carries both broader and related, on the transitive closure, not just the direct edge (SKOS S27).
C3Inverse completeness. Every directed edge of an inverse-declared pair has its inverse materialized or derivable.
C4Tag-versus-link invariant. No relation type appears as a tag, no tag as a typed link field.
C5Provenance-status compatibility. A befund or diagnose edge must be generated by a human-review activity.
C6Stable node identity. Every node carries an identifier decoupled from its filename, so a rename does not break confirmed typings.

06 — In practice

Realization#

The typed edge lives in the vault as a Dataview inline field on the link. The same edge is emitted by the exporter as RDF, as a verbalized Semantic-Markdown schema, and as a typed tool interface.

# in the note, human- and Dataview-readable
supports:: [[Thaller 2021 - Historical Information and Graph Structures]]

The instrument vault-graph extracts the edges, enriches type, direction, confidence and evidence from mutual-kNN candidate pairs, and freezes the result as a versioned artifact, kept strictly separate from the byte-deterministic core. Provenance is first-class at the interface.

07 — Meta

About & cite#

WEFT is the Modelling artifact of a design-science research project. The human-readable source of truth is a Markdown specification; this Turtle and these docs are the derived machine form.

Version	0.1 (draft) · [date placeholder]
License	CC BY 4.0
DOI	[Zenodo DOI on first release]
Authors	Christopher Pollin · Digital Humanities Craft
Cite as	[BibTeX / CFF placeholder]