The gap was there before the agent
When an agent invents what a column means, the reflex is to blame the model. Jessica Talisman's argument is sharper: the underspecification was always there, and human inquiry at read time was concealing it — the analyst asked the engineer, got the answer, wrote nothing down, and the cost recurred without ever being attributed to the definition. A machine consumer has no such recourse, so it completes the definition from statistical exposure to thousands of other organizations' schemas. We took ISO 11179-4 and the Z39.19 warrant triad and pointed them at ontoref's own glossary. Of its thirty-odd terms, 11 declare external warrant with no corpus reference and 18 state no boundary at all. The finding is not that we lack the fields — we have them. It is that a default was making a claim nobody had made.
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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