Things in States Through Time (TST) - Foundational Specification v0.5

This document proposes TST - Things in States Through Time, a domain-neutral constructive ontological framework intended to support semantic modeling, predicate structure, derived semantic organization, schema construction, temporal reasoning, continuity preservation, causal reasoning, epistemic layering, semantic interoperability, semantic governance, and constructive semantic generation through minimal generative primitives.

TST follows the principle of being minimally categorical and maximally constructive. The framework therefore seeks to minimize primitive ontological categories while maximizing the compositional derivation of semantic structure from continuity-preserving predicate constructions.

The atomic grammatical form of the framework is:

S(T,t)

meaning that Thing T occupies State S at Time or temporal frame t.

From this substrate, TST compositionally derives predicates, relations, events, processes, meanings, interpretations, causal structures, epistemic structures, records, embeddings, schema structures, governance rules, and higher-order semantic systems. TST therefore positions ontology not merely as descriptive categorization, but as a constructive grammar capable of generating, validating, and governing predicate structures, semantic organization, and continuity-preserving schema systems across domains.