relata v0.0.0

relata

Primitives for an applied ontology

Motivation

The data most of us work with will be under defined. We have few constructs describing its nature—yet, we're describing it all the time. It comes in the form of documentation, operations, and interfaces. We hide knowledge in our implementations, and as long as it stays there we're bound to repeat ourselves.

Most of us will be constrained to the arrays, maps, numbers, and strings that can be serialized to JSON. We may employ intricate solutions like GraphQL for better semantics and a strongly typed interface, but we avoid building the foundation for describing the domain of the data.

Relata is an exploratory project to provide a tractable interface for describing this knowledge.

If that sounds like the death knell of an over ambitious project, well… I would agree. Luckily others have done most of the work for us. This is inspired by work of those brave explorers of ontologies who wrestle the sea beast of mereology.

Specifically Nicola Guarino, Chris Welty, Giancarlo Guizzardi, and likely many more who I have yet to credit.

Their work on DOLCE and OntoClean provide compelling conceptual models to describe the systems we build. Relata is an attempt to codify the notions of Identity, Unity, Rigidity, and Dependence in an implementation designed for humans first and computers second.