CausalsActors and objects
Companies, people, organizations, places, commodities, infrastructure, currencies, financial signals, and securities.
Causals Ontology
A shared language for
what a link means.
A useful graph must distinguish what exists, what happened, how things are connected, and what evidence supports a proposed cause. This page is a public overview, not a full schema release.
The building blocks
Different things belong
in different places.
What happened
Specific changes or actions, with participants, time, context, and—when available—quantified shifts.
What may recur
Event classes can organize similar cases. Any experience-based transmission claim needs its own validation record.
Relationship families
01Physical flowProduction, supply, inputs, consumption, shipment, and trade routes.
02Capital flowOwnership, investment, obligations, guarantees, and links to tradable instruments.
03Descriptive contextAffiliation, location, position, and other context. Useful to inspect; not automatically a path for propagation.
04Causal and event linksReported cause-and-effect, temporal event links, participation, observed shifts, and tested transmission patterns.
The central rule
Connection is not causation.
For each relationship, direction follows a defined meaning—not merely the grammar of a sentence. A source may support an association, a hypothesis, a reported causal statement, or a measured result. Those are different claims.
The ontology is versioned so that a contributor can challenge the definition of a relationship as well as the contents of an individual record.
Public release boundary
This overview explains the conceptual model. The full ontology specification, graph snapshots, benchmarks, and implementation are separate publication decisions. See About & openness ↗.
This overview explains the conceptual model. The full ontology specification, graph snapshots, benchmarks, and implementation are separate publication decisions. See About & openness ↗.
Improve the vocabulary