ontology-manager

MIF Ontology Manager

Manage MIF ontology definition files. All operations are validated against schema/ontology/ontology.schema.json.

Prerequisites

Ensure yq and jq are available. For JSON Schema validation, python3 with jsonschema is preferred.

Available Scripts

Scripts are located at .claude/skills/ontology-manager/scripts/.

Create a New Ontology

Every ontology, base and domain, is authored in the modeled-information-format/ontologies repo, not here — run this from a checkout of that repo, writing into its ontologies/ directory:

bash <path-to-MIF-checkout>/.claude/skills/ontology-manager/scripts/scaffold_ontology.sh \
  <id> <version> [--extends mif-base,shared-traits] \
  > ontologies/<id>.ontology.yaml

• id: lowercase, hyphens only (e.g. my-domain)
• version: semver (e.g. 0.1.0)
• --extends: comma-separated parent ontology IDs

Validate an Ontology

bash .claude/skills/ontology-manager/scripts/validate_ontology.sh \
  <file.yaml> [schema/ontology/ontology.schema.json]

Checks: YAML syntax, required fields, ID format, semver, base types, entity names, trait references, discovery regex, JSON Schema compliance.

Inspect an Ontology

bash .claude/skills/ontology-manager/scripts/inspect_ontology.sh \
  <file.yaml> [--section entities|namespaces|traits|relationships|discovery] [--json]

Convert Between Formats

bash .claude/skills/ontology-manager/scripts/convert_format.sh \
  <yaml2json|json2yaml|yaml2jsonld> <input> [output]

Ontology Structure

Every .ontology.yaml file has this structure:

ontology:
  id: my-domain         # REQUIRED: ^[a-z][a-z0-9-]*$
  version: "0.1.0"      # REQUIRED: semver
  description: "..."
  schema_url: https://mif-spec.dev/schema/ontology/ontology.schema.json
  extends: [mif-base]   # optional parent ontologies

namespaces:              # cognitive triad hierarchy
  _semantic:             # facts, concepts, relationships
  _episodic:             # events, experiences, timelines
  _procedural:           # step-by-step processes

entity_types:            # array of entity definitions
  - name: my-entity     # ^[a-z][a-z0-9-]*$
    base: semantic       # semantic|episodic|procedural
    traits: [timestamped]
    schema:
      required: [name]
      properties:
        name: {type: string}

traits:                  # reusable mixins
  my-trait:
    fields:
      my_field: {type: string}

relationships:           # typed connections
  my-rel:
    from: [entity-a]
    to: [entity-b]
    symmetric: false

discovery:               # auto-detection patterns
  enabled: true
  confidence_threshold: 0.8
  content_patterns:
    - pattern: "\\bkeyword\\b"
      namespace: _semantic/knowledge
  file_patterns:
    - pattern: "auth|login"
      namespaces: [_semantic/knowledge]