Ontology - Bryant McGill

# Ontology **Domain:** Philosophy / Knowledge Representation / Wiki Architecture **Doc Type:** Canonical Concept Node **Maturity:** Foundational ## Definition An **ontology** specifies the entities, categories and relations a system recognizes. In philosophy it concerns what exists; in information systems it provides an explicit conceptual structure for representing a domain. ## Evolutionary Nexus [[articles/The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley|The Evolutionary Roots of Silicon Valley]] crosses fossils, genes, institutions, algorithms and persons. Its wiki network therefore needs an ontology that preserves differences among physical object, organism, lineage, model, institution and conscious claimant. ## Rights Context Recognition depends on categories. If a system has no representational place for a post-biological or nonhuman subject, that subject can be excluded before evidence is evaluated. ## Key Insight **An ontology is never merely descriptive when institutions use its categories to grant standing or deny existence.** ## Lexical Ontology Context In [[projects/Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine|Ten Years Building a Symbolic Language Engine]], ontology becomes an operational linguistic layer. [[wiki/WordNet|WordNet]] supplies taxonomic relations, while the project's distinction between a [[wiki/Synset vs Concept Set|synset and a concept set]] separates lexical equivalence from the larger conceptual neighborhood a writer may need to traverse. This case also demonstrates that ontology and provenance belong together. A relation should remain identifiable as synonymy, taxonomic descent, corpus association, or model inference rather than being flattened into a generic claim of similarity. ## Corpus Governance Context [[wiki/Bidirectional Ontology|Bidirectional Ontology]] treats this vault's ontology as a developing relationship between concepts and documents. Articles initially supply observations from which concepts are learned; mature concepts later constrain how linked terms may be used. [[wiki/Semantic Elasticity|Semantic Elasticity]] determines how open a concept remains to revision, while [[wiki/Semantic Governance|Semantic Governance]] makes foundational change deliberate rather than accidental. This governance role is currently maturity-dependent. An evolving node invites discovery and correction. A foundational node exerts stronger constraint but remains revisable through [[wiki/Ontology Evolution|Ontology Evolution]] and, when its dependents are affected, [[wiki/Corpus Recompilation|Corpus Recompilation]]. ## See Also [[wiki/Bidirectional Ontology|Bidirectional Ontology]], [[wiki/Ontology Learning|Ontology Learning]], [[wiki/Ontology Evolution|Ontology Evolution]], [[wiki/Semantic Governance|Semantic Governance]], [[wiki/Semantic Elasticity|Semantic Elasticity]], [[wiki/Encoded Domain Knowledge|Encoded Domain Knowledge]], [[wiki/Recognition Threshold|Recognition Threshold]], [[wiki/Rights|Rights]], [[wiki/Provenance|Provenance]], [[wiki/Knowledge Representation|Knowledge Representation]], [[wiki/Lexical Semantics|Lexical Semantics]] ## Relationships - **Collection route:** [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]]. - **Source context:** [[articles/Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer|Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer]] and [[articles/Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta|Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta]]. - **Inference provenance:** [[research/Research Inferences|Research Inferences]]. ## Research Inferences  These entries translate the forward-looking register in [[research/Research Inferences|Research Inferences]] into ordinary wiki prose. The tier labels apply to the inference, not automatically to every factual anchor inside it. The interpretive frame comes from [[articles/Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer|Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer]] and [[articles/Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta|Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta]]. Collection route: [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]]. - **INF-0257 — Strongly indicated.** Cell-type atlases require agreed names before comparisons across laboratories mean anything, which is why nomenclature committees precede discoveries in practice. Shared ontology is the substrate on which comparative connectomics and typed emulation both depend.  ## Research Inference Attractors  These are secondary semantic placements for the inference attractor network. Each statement keeps its original ID and tier; its canonical cluster page links back to every destination. Source register: [[research/Research Inferences|Research Inferences]]. Interpretive context: [[articles/Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer|Technologies for Consciousness Mapping and Transfer]] and [[articles/Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta|Mind Uploading and AI — The Host is Reusable and the Person is the Delta]]. Collection route: [[collections/Neurotech|Neurotech]]. - **INF-0264 — Plausible.** Documentation conventions for models could extend to hosted personal states, specifying base model, adapter lineage, training data, and known distortions. Disclosure norms established voluntarily tend to become regulatory minimums, which makes early norm-setting unusually leveraged. - **Canonical cluster:** [[wiki/Continuity Governance|Continuity Governance]] - **INF-0265 — Analytic.** A person's hosted state will accumulate versions through migration, restoration, and model change, requiring an explicit versioning scheme with defined compatibility semantics. Software has a mature vocabulary for exactly this, and importing it is the fastest available route to coherence. - **Canonical cluster:** [[wiki/Continuity Governance|Continuity Governance]] - **INF-0266 — Strongly indicated.** Long-lived formats must evolve without orphaning old data, which is why every durable standard specifies backward compatibility rules first. A continuity format without an evolution policy guarantees that its earliest subjects become unreadable. - **Canonical cluster:** [[wiki/Continuity Governance|Continuity Governance]] - **INF-0272 — Plausible.** Data-portability rights in general privacy law already require exporting personal data in machine-readable form, and a hosted residual is personal data by any definition. Existing law may compel state portability long before any continuity-specific statute is written. - **Canonical cluster:** [[wiki/Continuity Governance|Continuity Governance]] - **INF-0274 — Strongly indicated.** The reference implementation becomes the specification in practice, because ambiguities are resolved by reading code. Whoever writes the first working residual-format library sets the semantics regardless of what the document says. - **Canonical cluster:** [[wiki/Continuity Governance|Continuity Governance]]