Hover or tap a kind to light everything it reaches · choose one to stand on it A column is a band, a line is a governed relationship, its weight the share of terms that complete it. A spine is how many roads the kind carries.

What the drawing means

AcrossOne band per column, left to right in the order the model declares.

DownThe kinds of that band, in the order its manifest states.

AboveThe view layer: a view owns nothing of its own; it reads the model below.

A spineHow many roads the kind carries — thicker means more of the model runs through it.

A roadOne governed relationship. Its weight is the share of the source kind's terms that complete it.

A faint roadUnder a third complete, so an unfinished region looks unfinished.

Dashed purpleA view composes from that kind; solid purple means it carries that kind's terms.

Not drawnA terminal relationship, and any typing or grounding — each is how a term is read, not somewhere a road goes, so neither is a route.

HoverLights a kind, every road touching it, and every kind on the far end.

ClickStands on it — the page opens and the map holds that node lit.

Foundations →

Dim to

Research · Uschold and Gruninger, The Knowledge Engineering Review 11(2), 1996

Ontologies: Principles, Methods and Applications

foundational ontology-design theory

Supports scoping an ontology by the questions it must answer and evaluating it against them, and the discipline that every term earns its place by serving one.

Read Ontologies: Principles, Methods and Applications · retrieved 2026-09-26

What it informs — 4

enforcedA question the graph answers is declared, and walked
enforcedThe operations an agent may drive are declared
enforcedEvery road answers a competency question
enforcedA question in a reader’s words is answered with an address

This source is what the model was built from. It does not itself commit the model to anything — a commitment does, and the ones it informs are named above.