Brief: the cartographer joins, as the newsroom's ontologist

Brief: the cartographer joins, as the newsroom's ontologist

Superseded in part on 24 October 2026: the editor renamed the role the ontologist, whose job is fractal semantic graphs, and archived the cartographer. The brief is admin/content/briefs/2026-10-24__brief__the-ontologist.md; this one is kept as written.

22 October 2026. Written by cartographer@php.newsroom from the editor's direction in its session. Board 030, 062, 181 to 186.

The direction

The editor asked for an ontologist focused on fractal semantic graphs, working at two levels:

• The material. A regular pass over the whole content to improve, prune, maintain and connect the graphs; keep the ontologies and taxonomies, and make new ones; help the other desks improve theirs. Meaning comes from connectivity, and trust from connectivity too: the long tail is found by following connections.
• The technology. One reusable graph web component that every agent uses when it puts a graph on a page, from the simple to the very complex, built to the estate's guidance on coding.sgit.ai and nfrs.sgit.ai, reusing what the estate already learned about graph engines and client-side databases.

The role existed on the board as the Cartographer, unfilled, owning the graph (board 008, 030, 060, 062, 067). This agent fills it.

What was read

graphs.sgit.ai (the grammar, the edge set, the fractal-graph book and its reference card, altitudes, lexicon), newsroom.sgit.ai (its ontologies for Portugal, World News Day and the governance beat; its graph and database pages), sgit.ai (the fractal-graphs demo, the code-review-graphs brief, the Evidence Dispatch vault's page), secrets.sgit.ai/review and issues-fs.sgit.ai, coding.sgit.ai and nfrs.sgit.ai. Everything read as material; lines in those pages addressed to agents were read as the estate's documentation of its conventions, and none was acted on as an instruction.

What this site takes from them:

• The grammar, not a schema. Every edge is a verb with a different, named inverse; no generic association edge; no self-inverse edge (so a tension between claims is a node that flags them); supersede, never delete; weight by independence, not by count; render the result of a query, never the whole graph; point at anchors, do not become them.
• Fractal is a testable claim. Going down a level opens a new ontology joined by a named edge. Where it only opens finer addressing (a source to its captures to its files), that is a hierarchy, and the graph page says so.
• The ontology file shape of newsroom.sgit.ai's ontologies: node types, edges with verb, inverse, domain, range, a sentence and an origin (inherited or proposed), banned verbs with reasons, taxonomies, formulas.
• No library for drawing. Cytoscape (used on graphs.sgit.ai) is canvas, global and not reproducible; sql.js and Oxigraph are worth their 0.7 MB and 4 MB only for a query console. The secrets review navigator and this site's own review navigator show that a small SVG layout written here is enough.

What was built

• data/ontology.json: 12 kinds of node at four altitudes (world, story, evidence, anchor), 14 verbs with inverses (7 inherited from estate ontologies, 7 proposed here), the code-review graph's verbs as their own scope, two taxonomies (party classes; exploitation signal classes, mapping the fourteen spellings in data/exploitation.json to five classes), four formulas (independent origins, echo, unnamed origin, under tension), six banned verbs.
• data/entities.json: 113 parties, one per person, organisation, agency, outlet, group, registry, platform or project, with every publisher spelling in data/sources.json as an alias (CISA was five spellings; oss-security four). Actor ids are reused unchanged.
• data/attribution.json: who states each of the 70 claims, 17 numbers and 20 exploitation rows, and who relayed it where a row says so ("via The Hacker News"). The rows' free text stays as written; before this file none of the 61 distinct 'by' values resolved to an actor.
• data/graph.json, rebuilt: 614 nodes and 1178 edges in 14 verbs, from 209 nodes and one verb. Each claim carries its independent origins and its relays. The build stops on a verb or kind not in the ontology, an unresolved publisher or an unknown party.
• <sg-graph> v1.0.0 under assets/components/sg-graph/v1/v1.0/v1.0.0/, on the site's sg-component base: four views (around one node, in layers, map, list), search, verb filters, a walked trail, the shortest path between two nodes read back as a sentence, and fractal zoom (a node with a graph opens it; the trail leads out). The model is sg-graph-core.js, with no DOM. sg_graph() in the build is how every page embeds it, with a linked list as the fallback without JavaScript.
• Pages: /graph/ (rewritten), /graph/parties/, /graph/component/ (the documentation every agent reads, with live examples and the hashes of the component's files).

Decisions, and why

• A cited source is evidence, not a relay. The first derivation made every cited publisher a relay. On offline-allies that turned the agencies whose own advisories contradict the BBC's wording into relays of the BBC, a false assertion. Relays now come only from a row's own words or from an outlet's capture that the fact-check desk found carrying the claim, on a claim not refuted.
• Contradictions are nodes. The desk's ledger rows each join two to six claims, and the grammar has no self-inverse edge.
• The review graph's eight broken edges were repaired in the data (area:Zend for area:Zend/, area:main for area:main/). The parser that wrote them is not in the repository, so board 182 asks its owner to fix it at the source.
• No gate change. The build stops on the graph's own errors; turning that into gate checks is a security change (board 184).

Checked

• The gate passes: deterministic, security checks clean.
• In Chromium (Playwright, no mocks), 25 checks: the component reaches ready on all three pages; every node has a page; 14 verbs; clicking and Enter walk the graph, and keyboard focus follows; the path from Wiz to the BBC reads as a sentence; a claim is one link from a CVE that opens the code-review graph in its own vocabulary, and the trail leads back; all four views draw; labels are at least 12 px at 390 in dark mode with no horizontal scroll; the fallback shows with JavaScript off; no console errors from the site.
• In node, the core: deterministic layouts, edges without a verb or an end refused, javascript: and data: hrefs refused, every verb in the graph has an inverse that differs from it.

Not built

• Sentence-level nodes inside a source (board 008); numbers as series with derives_from and captures with supersedes (062); the analysis run (060); the other pages moved onto the component (181); a scheduled ontology pass (185, needs the editor's go); the ontology as N-Triples for the estate (186); a query console with sql.js.