07 — Semantics Governance (who owns meaning)

Principle

The framework never ships "the ontology." It ships the machinery for governing meaning: registry → lookup → validation → versioned evolution. Content is always user-supplied.

Ownership layers

Layer	What	Owner	Lives in
Foundation vocab	schema.org, FOAF, DCTerms, PROV-O, SKOS	Standards bodies	src/semantic/vocab.ts (prefixes only)
Domain ontology (TBox)	Classes, properties, ranges — the stable meaning	Data steward / domain expert	Versioned files, e.g. ontologies/core@v3.ttl
Application shapes	Per-agent constraints (required fields, ranges)	Agent builder	SHACL shapes/<agent>.ttl, versioned with the agent

Rules of the road

1. Agents look up, never invent. Unknown predicate → SHACL gate rejects + suggests canonical term. No silent drift (worksAt vs worksFor).
2. LLM proposes mappings; autonomy by default, review optional. emp_location → schema:workLocation commits on proposal (new MappingProposals({ store }) — default), matching the autonomous write path everywhere else; provenance (dct:source) is mandatory. Where drift is unacceptable, opt into human review: new MappingProposals({ autonomy: false }) queues proposals for decide(), or gate the tool with humanInTheLoopMiddleware.
3. TBox stable, ABox streams. Ontology changes on release cadence with review; facts stream continuously. Queries/rules/dashboards couple to the TBox, never to source formatting.
4. Provenance mandatory on writes. Every agent-committed quad carries dct:source + prov:wasDerivedFrom (+ validUntil where applicable). No source = rejected at GraphStore.validate. Claims are queryable objects with evidence, not footnotes.
5. Text is the interface, triples are the asset. Runs return text but commit validated triples — the graph compounds, prompts don't have to.

Lifecycle

bootstrap (reuse foundation vocab) → map (LLM proposes source→ontology) → approve (human) → enforce (SHACL on every write) → evolve (TBox v3→v4 with migration + conformance tests).