Structured descriptions of the entities in a domain, the relations between them, and the conditions under which each item can be authenticated and evaluated.
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In their broadest sense, ontologies are structured maps of the known universe, all of the “things” in it, and all of the other “things” that connect them together. Our ontologies practice focuses on what counts as evidence, how ontologies condition each piece of information that falls within their boundaries, and how they hold a workflow together from first question to final output - adapting to changes in sources and context while keeping the reasoning traceable.
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Most organisations treat information as uniform in quality and hold the real judgements about evidential weight in the heads of experienced staff. That works until the organisation scales, the staff leave, or someone asks why two similar cases were decided differently. Claims of identical form can carry very different weight depending on domain, source, operator competence and purpose, and firms rarely have any written standard capturing this.
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1. How is "what counts as evidence" actually decided in a given domain, and can that decision be written down without distorting it?
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2. How much of an evidential standard is domain-specific, and how much is portable between domains?
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3. What happens to work in progress when the governing standard changes, and can the consequences be traced rather than re-litigated?
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4. Can a common evidential standard be maintained across teams without becoming overhead that practitioners route around?