Vision
Product identity
Section titled “Product identity”Crosswalker supports acquiring, shaping, connecting, understanding, sharing, and maintaining ontology-shaped knowledge over time.
The product is an ontology lifecycle system, not only an importer or Recipe runner — in one sentence, a structural reification and ontology lifecycle management engine. Import is the entry point; durable value comes from keeping structured knowledge navigable, connected, explainable, portable, and maintainable as sources and local needs evolve.
Operating model
Section titled “Operating model”Crosswalker manages schema-governed Knowledge Sets using machine-evaluable declarative Recipes.
| Role | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Schema Contract | Governs which representations are valid |
| Knowledge Set | Extensional family: the concepts and assertions being managed |
| Recipe | Intensional family: portable intended behavior |
| Tier 1 | Canonical Crosswalker-managed representation and local authority, not a root artifact family |
The system’s deeper mechanism is data morphology: decode and re-embody source shapes on the write side; project and present useful shapes on the read side.
Machine-actionability
Section titled “Machine-actionability”Crosswalker makes ontology knowledge machine-actionable through portable recipes, schemas, queries, and mappings.
- Portable Recipes make repeatable behavior inspectable, validatable, shareable, and replayable.
- Schema Contracts let the plugin, external tools, scripts, agents, and future runtimes produce or consume conforming artifacts.
- Queries turn governed knowledge into answers and views without replacing canonical Tier 1 authority.
- Mappings connect concepts across Knowledge Sets while preserving typed assertions and provenance.
Current and planned
Section titled “Current and planned”| Horizon | Capabilities |
|---|---|
| Current | CSV/XLSX/JSON import; visual mapping and preview; schema-validated Tier 1 generation; portable ImportRecipe preservation; typed crosswalk records; Bases query surfaces; first export paths |
| Next | Durable local Recipe library and browser; full-source portability proofs; first-class MappingSet identity and authoring; broader export/share workflows |
| Later | Ontology evolution and migration; separate Execution Record and Package Manifest contracts; stronger audit, packaging, and community distribution |
Implementation status lives in the milestone roadmap. Artifact roles and authority live in the permanent concept model.
Design principles
Section titled “Design principles”- Plain text first — canonical managed knowledge remains readable Markdown and frontmatter.
- Schema governed — machine-readable contracts outrank any one engine or UI projection.
- General ontology core, compliance-first experience — internal primitives work across domains; launch workflows lead with GRC needs.
- Portable and replaceable — Recipes, schemas, mappings, and queries survive changes in tools and runtimes.
- Retrieval centered — structure and views help people decide what they need to know and reach it.
- UI first, configuration as escape hatch — every lifecycle stage needs an understandable interface; declarative files remain the programmatic path.
- Authority is explicit — authority follows ontological role, not storage location, format, lifecycle phase, or UI model.
- No artifact-noun inflation — new root nouns require genuinely independent identity, lifecycle, authority, and consumers.