A question in a reader’s words is answered with an address

Answers Epistemology

A question a reader types is answered with something the model already declares, or with something composed from the model’s own parts, and never with words alone: a declared question or shape offered to open on the board, or a shape of the kinds the words name, connected along the roads between them. The order is fixed, declared first, composed second, a model last. The first two tiers run where the reader is, by words alone, so nothing typed leaves the browser; and the build holds the matcher to finding every declared question from that question’s own words and from its name.

What goes wrong without it

An ontology is judged by the competency questions it answers, and a reader does not arrive knowing the model’s phrasing for theirs. Matching their words to the declared questions is the cheapest and the most honest bridge, because every answer it gives is one the build has already bound and given an address. Composing from the kinds they named is the next step in the same spirit: the answer is still the model’s parts, held by the same grammar, drawn by the same engine. A model that writes an answer in prose is the last resort because it is the only tier whose answer is not an address, and the two tiers before it will usually have done the work. Holding the matcher to the model’s own questions is the least a matcher can be held to: what it offers a reader is then never worse than the model’s index of itself.

What proves it — 1

Each is a gate the build runs: a check inside a ring, a whole ring, or an eval beside them. A build stops at the first that refuses.

• ring:6the site ring
  The built site is the whole graph and nothing else: every page indexed, addressed by a label, self-contained and free of any private name; every structured-data identifier a subject the standards export wrote; every page unfurling to its own card, and every sitemap entry naming that card as its image; every journey with its SCXML twin; the sitemaps held to the graph; a graph under a megabyte. And the host held to the ground: the Worker serving the build as its assets and running first for every request; the allowlist and the redirect list it carries cut from the graph, every address the graph once answered to in the list with the status the law gives it and none of them a page; every endpoint served by the files it names; and the beacon sending to the collector's endpoint and nowhere else; every projection the law declares in the build, served by the files that say they serve it, and named in llms.txt; and the Worker reading the host's caching rules and owed headers from the law, writing none of its own; every answer a question carries a page where the walk is non-empty and nowhere else, its structured data naming exactly the rows the walk reached.

Derived from — 2

• Grüninger and Fox, IJCAI-95 Workshop on Basic Ontological Issues in Knowledge Sharing, 1995Methodology for the Design and Evaluation of Ontologies
• Uschold and Gruninger, The Knowledge Engineering Review 11(2), 1996Ontologies: Principles, Methods and Applications

Where this model stands

The ask operation stands above the board on the compose door, and on the front door, which sends the question to the board in its address. A question is matched by the words it shares with every declared question and shape, their phrasings, labels, kind nouns and verbs, and the best three are offered to open on the board as declared; where the words name two or more kinds with a road between them, a shape of those kinds is offered as well, composed on the spot and held by the same grammar.

Ring 6 asks the matcher every declared question in its own phrasing and by its name, and refuses a build where any is not the first thing offered. A model is offered nothing yet, which is the order the rule fixes.

What it does not claim

The third tier: a model that only ranks declared candidates, from a route on the Worker beside the collector, answering with addresses and never with prose of its own.

A row named in a question offered as a pin; asking for a job or a plan by name and opening its merged shape; asking from a term page with the term already pinned.

RUL-055