Standards Effort
The IIOS Standards
For organizational judgment to become portable infrastructure, its objects must be standardized. This section defines the canonical models, schemas, and governance of IIOS — published, versioned, and open in the manner of a standards body.
The Cognitive Enterprise Project maintains the IIOS standards in the manner of a standards body: published, versioned, and open. The specifications below are at varying stages of maturity — from ratified drafts to work in development.
Why standards
A discipline needs shared objects. If every organization models evidence, judgment, and decisions differently, none of it interoperates and none of it compounds. Standards make organizational reasoning portable.
Canonical objects
The standards define a small set of canonical objects — evidence, reasoning, judgment, decision, relationship — with precise semantics, so the same concepts mean the same thing across systems and domains.
Schemas & interoperability
Each object has a versioned schema. Conforming implementations can exchange reasoning objects, cite one another, and be reasoned over together — the way documents share a format on the web.
Governance
The standards evolve through an open, versioned process: proposals, review, and published changes. Reference implementations prove each version before it is ratified.
Canonical Object Model
The core objects of institutional intelligence: evidence, reasoning, judgment, decision, relationship.
Ontology Standard
A shared vocabulary and type system for the entities an organization reasons about.
Relationship Standard
How relationships between objects are typed, weighted, and traversed.
Evidence Standard
A model for evidence: source, provenance, confidence, and how it attaches to reasoning.
Judgment Standard
The structure of a judgment — its evidence, reasoning, confidence, and accountable author.
Prompt Standard
How reasoning requests are expressed, parameterized, and made reproducible.
Publication Standard
How reasoning objects are published, cited, and referenced across systems.
Identity Standard
Representing people, roles, and authority so judgment can be attributed and governed.
Governance Model
How the standards evolve: proposals, versions, and the process for change.
Reference Implementations
Conforming instantiations of the standards across domains — the proof they interoperate.
Developer Guide
Practical guidance for building on the canonical object model.
Version History
The changelog of the standards — what changed, when, and why.