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

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]