Systems Atlas Project
Level 0
Meta
meta
Justification
What has been written down.
Six fields are required of every node. Empty ones are shown as declared gaps — a gap means nothing has been written, not that there is nothing to write.
Definition
Formal organisation-of-knowledge structures - ontologies, top-level categories, representation standards and metadata or provenance systems - that define and relate concepts across domains to enable interoperability, retrieval, integration and analysis.
Inclusion
- ontologies, taxonomies and controlled vocabularies
- metadata and provenance schemes
- standards for semantic representation and exchange
- top-level categories and mapping frameworks that mediate across domains
Exclusion
- causal mechanisms in real systems — lens mechanism
- the empirical variables themselves — lens measurement
- domain-specific institutional structures — goes to political
Sources
- ISO/IEC 21838-1, Information technology - Top-level ontologies. · Provides an institutional definition of meta-level artefacts as domain-neutral ontologies enabling interoperability.
Boundary cases
Declared gap No boundary cases have been recorded.
Uncertainty
- This is a domain of representations rather than of the world, so every other domain has a meta shadow. That may mean it does not belong among the nine as a sibling. The atlas is itself a meta artefact, so this domain contains the thing that contains it.
Rules
Whether this division survives the six rules.
Rules 1, 5 and 6 are checked by the validator and reported here. Rules 2, 3 and 4 are judgements about meaning and cannot be automated — no state is claimed for them. The rules themselves are set out in the method.
At most seven
Not applicable. This node is not a division.
Mutually exclusive
A judgement about whether the parts overlap. Not automated.
Collectively exhaustive
A judgement about what the parts leave out. Not automated.
Equal abstraction
A judgement about whether the parts answer the same question type. Not automated.
Decomposable or terminal
No children and not marked terminal — unfinished, rather than an endpoint.
Justified in writing
5 of the six fields carry content. The rest are declared gaps.