Ongtology

Context for LLMs

Ongtology (GSV-F3, pace-layer F) is a shared knowledge graph and vocabulary registry for cultural artifacts, in the media-ecology domain. It catalogs what humanity has made and how those things relate -- artists, films, tropes, scenes, movements, techniques -- as a queryable graph held deliberately apart from any one person's individual relationship to that culture (a taste graph or recommendation profile is explicitly not the point). Its name portmanteaus Walter Ong and 'ontology,' asserting that media are situated in human cognition and technology rather than abstract classification lattices, and that genre is something people do rather than a label to be adjudicated top-down. The architecture splits deliberately into two halves that most cultural-data tools collapse into one: a per-domain graph of entities and relations (music, film, TV, writing, games, visual art, internet culture) linking artifacts to genres, scenes, movements, and each other; and a separate registry of vocabulary primitives -- Genre, Scene, Movement, Trope, Technique, Resonance -- that recur across every domain, so each domain populates the shared primitives with its own instances instead of every medium reinventing the same conceptual scaffolding. Where source data carries continuous distance -- EveryNoise's 2D acoustic coordinates, taste embeddings, era-adjacency -- Ongtology preserves that manifold rather than flattening it into binary edges, treating time and place as primary axes rather than incidental metadata. Three operations are exposed as first-class APIs (the specific operations are not detailed beyond this framing in the provided material). Ongtology is the third of four related 'Ong' projects -- alongside Ong-Lots (live podcast orality analytics) and Ong Back (Twitter video-to-text) -- and per the strategy grounding also currently hosts a working Last.fm taste-ontology facet on disk (via a lastexport-to-scrobbles pipeline), even though the project's charter is explicitly to keep the general knowledge graph separate from any taste-graph facet; a related but separate project, auxology, is the dedicated Last.fm taste-engine. Status: founded 2026-05-27, currently at the design-doc stage with charter and canon docs written but, per the project's own GitHub, 'no code yet' for the core graph -- only the adjacent Last.fm facet is functional today.