OACIS treats the enterprise itself as the system under management — with version control, observability, and continuous integration applied to organizational knowledge.
Every design decision in OACIS traces back to these foundational principles.
All knowledge is stored in free, open, non-proprietary formats — Markdown, RDF/OWL, Apache Parquet, Open API specs, standard SQL. If the format requires a license to read, the knowledge inside is not truly yours. 100% reconstitutability: if the system disappears tomorrow, the knowledge survives intact.
All organizational information is accessible through standard pipelines. No information islands. No shadow IT dependencies. No tribal knowledge locked in one person's head. One graph, every source. If a system exists in the enterprise, a pipeline reaches it.
All information is understood through knowledge graphs, ontological mapping, and semantic retrieval — not just stored and searched. The system doesn't merely hold data; it comprehends relationships, context, and meaning. Storage without understanding is a warehouse, not intelligence.
All data pipelines compile — they validate, cross-link, and check for inconsistencies before committing. Malformed data is quarantined, not silently ingested. Broken data never enters the graph. If you can't replay it, you can't trust it.
All predictions and recommendations are tracked against actual outcomes. The system learns from the delta between what it predicted and what happened. Every forecast, every recommendation, every AI-generated insight carries a scorecard. No unaccountable predictions.
All knowledge maps to a formal ontology — IEEE SUMO at the top, ISO 21838 (BFO) for structure, domain ontologies (ACORD, HL7 FHIR, ISO 20022, CDM) in the middle, and organization-specific terms at the bottom. Every term means one thing. When the knowledge graph says "policy," it knows exactly what kind.
Not all knowledge is created equal. OACIS assigns every assertion a trust level — from natural law at the top to AI-generated inferences at the bottom. Higher-level knowledge always wins in conflicts.
A single database engine, extended to serve every storage mode the enterprise requires.
OACIS doesn't require a constellation of specialized databases. It runs on PostgreSQL — the world's most advanced open-source relational database — extended with purpose-built modules that transform it into a multi-modal knowledge platform:
Graph queries on relational data. Property graph traversals using openCypher syntax, stored in PostgreSQL tables. The knowledge graph lives here — entities, relationships, provenance, trust levels.
Vector similarity search. Embedding-based retrieval for semantic search, document similarity, and RAG pipelines. Nearest-neighbor queries on high-dimensional vectors without leaving PostgreSQL.
Time-series at scale. Hypertables with automatic partitioning for operational telemetry, contract timelines, regulatory change tracking, and temporal knowledge assertions.
Data lake integration. Query Apache Iceberg tables, Parquet files, CSV, and JSON directly from PostgreSQL. Powered by DuckDB's columnar execution engine. Cold storage, hot queries.
Horizontal scale-out. Distributed PostgreSQL for multi-tenant deployments and large-scale analytical workloads. Shard the knowledge graph across nodes without changing a query.
Geospatial intelligence. Location-aware queries for facility management, regional compliance mapping, service territory analysis, and geographic knowledge graph traversals.
OACIS resolves semantic ambiguity through a layered ontology — from universal concepts down to organization-specific terminology.
Suggested Upper Merged Ontology — 25,000+ terms covering all domains of human knowledge. The conceptual ceiling that ensures every lower ontology speaks the same language.
Basic Formal Ontology — the ISO standard for top-level ontology structure. Bridges SUMO to domain-specific ontologies with a formal, minimal upper layer.
ACORD (insurance), HL7 FHIR (healthcare), ISO 20022 (financial messaging), CDM (common domain model). Industry-standard vocabularies mapped to the upper ontology.
Your organization's specific terms, roles, processes, and entities — mapped upward through the domain and upper ontologies. When your company says "case," the graph knows exactly which kind.
Data doesn't just flow into the knowledge graph. It's compiled — through eight named components.
Traditional ETL moves data between systems. The OACIS Conveyor compiles raw information into structured knowledge — capturing intent, state, and behavior, then translating, cross-linking, validating, committing, and verifying. Every source, one pipeline, one graph.
git commit — every assertion gets an author, timestamp, source, trust level, and confidentiality tag.pytest — the last line of defense.The full OACIS framework spans 24 chapters across six parts. Read the book, explore the blog, or bring us in to assess your organization.