Declared, Not Filled: Context You Can Audit

Declared, Not Filled: Context You Can Audit

Jessica Talisman's essay splits the year's favourite buzzword in two: context as a container you fill, or context as a property you declare. ANSI/NISO Z39.19 has held the property view for a century — qualifiers, scope notes, warrant. ontoref reached the same record shape without ever citing the standard, then pushed it one step further: from declaring context on terms to declaring it on acts, where a signed witness answers 'on whose authority does this result exist?' with an exit code instead of fluency.

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AI is a Knowledge Tool. But Who Keeps the Knowledge Alive?

AI is a Knowledge Tool. But Who Keeps the Knowledge Alive?

Jessica Talisman's KGC 2026 talk is the clearest articulation of why AI strategies fail: organizations invest in data infrastructure and expect reasoning to emerge. She's right. But her solution — build knowledge infrastructure — stops exactly where the hard problem begins: who keeps the knowledge from drifting?

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DAGs Are Everywhere. None of Them Know What They Are.

DAGs Are Everywhere. None of Them Know What They Are.

CI/CD pipelines, compilers, runbooks, data orchestrators — they all use directed acyclic graphs. Every single one of them uses DAGs as execution models: this before that, topological ordering, dependency resolution. None of them use DAGs to represent what the system is, why it exists, or what trade-offs define it. That's the gap ontoref fills.

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