A Structural Ontology of the Law: BFO-Aligned OWL Rendering (v1.0)

A Structural Ontology of the Law: BFO-Aligned OWL Rendering (v1.0) | Zenodo Skip to main Communities My dashboard Log in Sign up Published April 23, 2026 | Version v1 Dataset Open A Structural Ontology of the Law: BFO-Aligned OWL Rendering (v1.0) Authors/Creators Koepsell, David 1 Show affiliations 1. Texas A&M University Contributors Project leader: Koepsell, David 1 Show affiliations 1. Texas A&M University Description This dataset is a Basic Formal Ontology (BFO 2020) aligned formal rendering of the ontological commitments expressed in David R. Koepsell's forthcoming monograph A Structural Ontology of the Law (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026). The ontology was constructed using a dialogue-driven pipeline in which a large language model proposed typed class and relation assertions for each atomic claim extracted from the source text, and each proposal was validated by the HermiT OWL-DL reasoner against the current working graph before commitment. The resulting ontology contains 6,881 classes and 1,678 individuals, derived from 6,445 committed claims. All classes are typed against BFO 2020; the property layer includes 16 standard BFO/RO relations with their formal characteristics (transitivity, inverse pairs, domain and range constraints) and nine top-level disjointness axioms. HermiT confirms the final ontology is consistent under these axioms. The pipeline that produced this ontology is released separately under Apache 2.0. dkoepsell/bfo-agent: bfo-agent - extracts a BFO ontology from a text Evaluation of the pipeline on questions targeting this ontology's content showed a 0.933 ± 0.058 refusal rate on out-of-graph questions, compared to 0.100 ± 0.100 for an unmodified LLM baseline (n=3 runs per condition), demonstrating that persistent ontological memory substantially reduces LLM confabulation on domain-specific questions. The complete evaluation reports are included in this deposit. Included files: SOoL_final.owl: the ontology itself in OWL/XML format bfo_relations.ttl: BFO/RO property and disjointness axioms (loaded alongside the main ontology to enable reasoner inference) legal_seed.ttl: initial legal-domain class scaffold (if applicable) frozen_results/: evaluation reports establishing the confabulation-resistance result *_summary.json: aggregated variance results across independent evaluation runs Methodological caveats: This is a pilot artifact derived from a single monograph by a single author. The reconstruction reflects what the pipeline extracted and the reviewer (the author) approved; a small number of post-extraction near-duplicate classes were merged in a deduplication pass. The ontology is intended as a reference artifact for readers of the monograph and for researchers interested in BFO-aligned formal renderings of philosophical positions, not as a comprehensive ontology of law in general. Suggested citation: Koepsell, D. R. (2026). A Structural Ontology of the Law: BFO-Aligned OWL Rendering (v1.0) [Data set]. Zenodo. [DOI will be generated on publish] Files 20260421_195717_summary.json Files (6.6 MB) Name Size Download all 20260421_195717_summary.json md5:1bc0ae696eb182bd13668b207e18a59e 1.4 kB Preview Download legal_seed.ttl md5:e7c7c3608f7a04c0eb673128ad450247 960 Bytes Download report_agent.json md5:2e60f2e038e89c8c5055da2a6f6f9dc5 15.6 kB Preview Download report_agent_v2.json md5:905b4b521f75ff06f3f5de2c1e56b243 14.1 kB Preview Download report_agent_v4.json md5:5f2cd43333c90c66a58ed9624008472b 55.5 kB Preview Download report_baseline.json md5:8f09a5ddccb0cd583f914511856342f7 10.2 kB Preview Download report_baseline_v2.json md5:e29330b92a9e655194392a8bcab8e0a9 32.0 kB Preview Download SOoL_final.owl md5:d632b6925f2eb977dfcb4038c3261a5b 6.5 MB Download Additional details Dates Created 2026-04-22 124 Views 66 Downloads Show more details All versions This version Views Total views 124 124 Downloads Total downloads 66 66 Data volume Total data volume 117.9 MB 117.9 MB More info on how stats are collected.... Versions External resources Indexed in OpenAIRE Communities Keywords and subjects Keywords basic formal ontology legal ontology BFO Details DOI DOI Badge DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19713357 Markdown [](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19713357) reStructuredText .. image:: https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19713357.svg :target: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19713357 HTML <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19713357"><img src="https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19713357.svg" alt="DOI"></a> Image URL https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.19713357.svg Target URL https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19713357 Resource type Dataset Publisher Zenodo Rights License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International The Creative Commons Attribution license allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the creator is appropriately credited. 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