Medical ontologies assume an authoritative voice. Legal ontologies eventually do. Telecom ontologies do by design. Policy and political work has none — the file is the disagreement. The system's job is to shape it, not to dissolve it.
Most ontologies assume an authoritative voice. Medical: there is one truth about a diagnosis. Legal: a contract has one binding interpretation, eventually. Telecom: a network configuration is or is not valid. Conflict has none of that. The dispute is the disagreement. Forcing a resolution at the schema layer is a category error.
The TACITUS graph holds disagreement structurally. Claim and counter-claim are paired objects. Evidence and counter-evidence are typed edges. Commitment and broken-commitment are bi-temporal events. Narrative drift is a primitive in its own right. The system shapes the dispute. The decision is human. WikiContradict and ConflictBank started naming this gap; we are operationalizing it.
The practitioner-facing implication is unglamorous. The system does not say "Sam was right" or "Alex was right." It shows that Sam asserted on Monday, Alex acknowledged ambiguously the same morning, and Alex denied scope on Thursday — three turns, three bi-temporal stamps, one contestation edge. The mediator decides what to do with that. The shape is the product.
Placeholder paragraph. The full note is being written. Send comments to hello@tacitus.me.