About Us
The people and the practice behind Ontoref.
Ontoref is designed and maintained by Jesús Pérez, a Rust developer and provisioning-systems architect with over three decades in software. It did not start on a blank page: it comes from years of hands-on work with self-hosted, open-source infrastructure, and from a conviction that fits in one sentence — a system must carry its own reasoning.
Who is behind it
One person, and the open work of a growing community. Authorship matters here for a concrete reason: every practice the protocol imposes exists because its absence once cost something. Ontoref is distilled from real systems that drifted, not designed on paper.
The craft is the ordinary one — Rust for what executes, Nickel for what is declared, Nushell for what orchestrates — with the discipline of someone who has had to keep in production what he wrote ten years ago.
Why ontoref exists
Because a project's knowledge lives where nobody can query it: in the head of whoever built it, in a chat thread, in a README that already lies. When that person leaves — or when an AI agent writes half the code — nothing is left to answer the question that matters: why is this the way it is, and what breaks if I change it?
Ontoref's answer is to declare the reasoning: axioms, tensions, practices, state and gates as typed NCL — queryable and verifiable. A protocol, never a runtime dependency. What it actually does is laid out in About ontoref.
How we work
By an uncomfortable rule: a check nobody has seen refuse is not a check. Before trusting a gate you must falsify it — break, on purpose, the thing it should catch, and confirm that it names it. If you have only ever seen it pass, all you know is that it can say yes.
And by a second one: failures get published. When something drifts we open a case file — the failure, its root cause, and what stayed in the repository so it cannot happen again. They are public, named and dated, in Case Files. Architecture decisions, with their live constraints, in ADR.
This is not transparency as a gesture. A system that records its own drifts is a system that someone who was not there can audit — which is, precisely, the problem ontoref sets out to solve.
Open and sovereign
Small tools an organization can genuinely own and control: no SaaS in the middle, no hostages, protocol and practice shared in the open. You enter with a single NCL file and climb tiers only when it hurts.
If any of this resonates — or if you think it is wrong and want to say so — get in touch.