Decision provenance

Every term in the schema-derived ontology traces back to a source, and every modelling decision traces back to a recorded review. This page is the audit trail: how the ontology was built from the PDTF schema and supporting material, how each layer was reviewed through the Linked Data Council, and which records govern this reference document itself. A completeness claim that hides where a term came from is a provenance lie — so the chain is laid out explicitly here.

Term-level provenance — the dct:source contract

The foundational rule (ODR-0004, PDTF Ontology Foundation) is that every term carries a dct:source that resolves to where it came from — a PDTF schema leaf path (a JSON pointer into the overlay schemas) or a business-glossary row. No term is invented free-floating; if it exists in the ontology, it can be walked back to a PDTF artefact or a curated OPDA glossary entry. This is what lets the reference claim it is generated from the schemas rather than hand-waved alongside them.

The same contract underpins the overlay profiles: a form's profile binds Category-G leaves as per-leaf sh:path shapes, and every other leaf is carried by dct:subject plus a JSON-pointer dct:source and entered in the gap register — never silently dropped, never fabricated. Provenance is therefore not a decorative annotation; it is the mechanism by which the gap register stays honest (see Known issues for the thin-profile consequence).

The ODR / ADR / council lineage

The ontology was not designed in one pass. Each layer was decided as an Ontology Decision Record (ODR), most of them adjudicated by the Linked Data Council (the dialectic expert panel, methodology in ODR-0001). The records below are the governing decisions, layer by layer; each links to its live record in the ODR corpus.

Programme retirement & reconciliation

The PDTF-to-ontology build was run as a time-boxed programme, and that programme is now closed. The retirement is itself recorded, so the reference is honest about being a historical anchor rather than an open work item:

• Programme RETIRED 2026-06-14. The work-breakdown programme record (ODR-0003, PDTF to Ontology: Programme and Work Breakdown) is retired. Modelling continues under fresh ODRs, but the original programme structure no longer governs new work.
• Descriptive layer reconciled complete (ODR-0028, Descriptive-Layer Completeness Reconciliation). The descriptive attribute binning was reconciled against the schemas; the emitted TTL is correct G-grade (a residual Category-C over-count is a report-side miscount, not an emitted defect).
• VC / DID compatibility waived. The Verifiable Credentials / DID compatibility layer (ODR-0016) is held as proposed and waived for this cut — claims provenance is delivered through PROV-O (ODR-0009), not a VC envelope, in the current reference.

Records governing this reference

This schema-derived ontology reference is itself the product of decisions taken in two later Council sessions and a historical rename ADR:

• ADR-0041 (session-038) — this reference is the generation model. The Ontology Reference Document decision established a generated reference from the committed TTL corpus, guarded by the doc-drift CI gate, with the multi-tool bake-off scored per layer and the best method adopted into one woven reference. Its current schema-derived status is draft and under review. The decision record is in the ODR / ADR corpus; the bake-off itself lives on the Tool bake-off page.
• ODR-0029 (session-039) — the inference / validation boundary. ODR-0029 disposes of the entailment regime: infer the relations whose closure the author wants (the seven frozen rules — subclass, subproperty, inverse, symmetric, transitive and their kin); validate the constraints the author wants checked (domain, range, cardinality, identity) as SHACL. On the OPDA schema the safe closure adds 0 triples over the flat asserted graph, so a single rendering per tool is correct (entailed ≡ asserted here).
• ADR-0042 — the historical rename. The former /manual section was renamed to /model for the DAMA reader presentation. Both former route families are now retired; the tiered reader view lives at Model views by audience.

Held-as-live dissents

Where the Council split, the dissent is recorded as live with a named re-open trigger rather than papered over — a decision that conceals its own contested points is not sound provenance. Two are carried on the record:

• Davis on ODR-0009 (claims / evidence / provenance) — held as live; re-opens if a named consumer needs a VC-envelope truth-maker the PROV-O backing does not carry.
• Allemang on ODR-0012 (the data-governance layer) — held as live on the referenced-not-imported DPV treatment.
• oc1 / llc1 held thin — re-opens when a named consumer issues a worked SPARQL query against an authority-register leaf (see Known issues).

Related: Known issues (the dated defect/caveat register), Consume the ontology (machine access), and the full ODR / ADR corpus.