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Record Ontology

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.

OWL 2 DL reasoner-validated version 0.5.0

Namespace

The base IRI for all terms is:

https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record#

A hash namespace: dereferencing any term — for example …/record#SelfVerifying — returns the whole ontology document. The recommended prefix is rec:.

Download & content negotiation

The namespace IRI serves human documentation or machine RDF depending on the Accept header. The serializations are also available directly:

Resource	Media type	URL
Ontology	`text/turtle`	record-ontology.ttl
Example — narrative	`text/turtle`	historical-narrative.ttl
Example — cogito	`text/turtle`	cogito.ttl

curl -H "Accept: text/turtle" https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record

Core terms

The one class, and the one non-record

Term	Meaning
`rec:Record`	The single class — a form, in a carrier, for an agent, at a level of abstraction. Records are made of Records.
`rec:Continuum`	The one thing that is not a record: the undivided ground a record's support (its locus) is individuated from (`rec:TheContinuum`; disjoint from `rec:Record`).
`rec:Agent`	A person or an AI — the one a record is for, and the one who individuates a record's support from the Continuum.

Warrant — a triad, one value per limit

`rec:Formal`	True in virtue of form (deductive — the triangle verifies itself); reaches toward the form-in-itself.
`rec:Empirical`	True by givenness (the senses, an instrument); defeasible; reaches toward the world-in-itself.
`rec:SelfVerifying`	True in virtue of the act of recording (the cogito); reaches the Agent-in-itself — the one limit not excluded.

Inference, support, metadata

`rec:Inference`	Defined: a Record with `rec:hasPremise` and `rec:concludes`. Carries a `rec:hasForce` — truth-preserving or ampliative. Chains form a derivation DAG.
`rec:hasProvenance` · `rec:hasLocus`	The dissolved carrier: provenance (whence) + locus (where/when, agent-relative). There is no `Carrier` class.
the cogito	Not a class but a pattern: self-verifying warrant + reflexive provenance + self-directedness. It halts the support-regress in the warrant (credit Descartes for existence, Hintikka for the warrant — not the res cogitans).
`rec:metadataOf`	A record about a record (sub-property of `rec:directedToward`). There is no metadata layer — only records directed at records.

Stance

DL-in-form, ecumenical-in-content: the OWL/DL ↔ SKOS schism is demoted to the rec:Warrant attribute (formal = subsumption; empirical = convention), not a choice of framework. The conceptual source of truth is ROOT.md in the source repository.

Source & citation

Source, rationale (ROOT.md), and issue tracker: github.com/commuted/record-ontology. Released under CC BY 4.0 (ontology & docs); scripts under MIT.

@misc{recordontology2026,
  title   = {The Record Ontology: A Domain-Neutral Model of Warranted Record-Structure},
  author  = {Hinchley, Ron},
  year    = {2026},
  version = {0.5.0},
  url     = {https://www.epistemic-ontology.net/record}
}