Who we are
TACITUS is a typed domain ontology, a graph engine, and a neurosymbolic reasoning layer — so LLMs, and the humans using them, can finally read and reason about conflict and human friction.
Story
TACITUS was born inside conflict, not in a lab.
We spent nearly a decade analyzing disputes for institutional decision-makers — governments, organisations, practitioners. The frameworks that worked lived inside people's heads, inside documents, inside rooms. Rigorous, earned, quietly powerful. None of it was reachable by a machine.
Then the models arrived — fluent, confident, structurally hollow. The problem was never the models. The problem was the absence of everything around them: no ontology, no graph, no typed memory of what an actor, a claim, a commitment actually is.
So we stopped waiting and started building it. TACITUS is the quiet infrastructure that gives AI a shared structure for conflict — and gives humans a machine-readable foundation for the problem they deal with most. Domain specific. Open where it matters. Useful from day one.
Principles
Not a text problem. The frameworks practitioners use are rigorous — they just live nowhere a machine can reach.
LLMs arrived confident and structurally hollow. Without a typed memory of actors, claims, commitments, fluency is the failure mode.
A typed ontology. A graph engine. Neurosymbolic reasoning. The products sit on top — never the other way around.
Unity does not require uniformity. Sustainable outcomes emerge from structured disagreement, not imposed agreement.
We make the structure behind judgement visible. Humans still decide. The machine stops hallucinating the facts.
Founder
Founder & CEO · TACITUS
New York City
Graduate training in international affairs and public policy. Nearly a decade analyzing conflict for institutional decision-makers. Founding editor of Concordia Discors — the magazine where we think in public about pluralism, disagreement, and the structure behind it.
The TACITUS Network
Practitioners who know what conflict actually looks like, and engineers who can give that knowledge a typed, queryable, machine-readable spine. Both, not either.
Policy and governance professionals, political analysts, mediators and arbitrators, domain experts in law, diplomacy and HR, human-friction specialists inside organisations. Bring your framework. We will make it machine-readable without flattening it.
Write as a practitionerNeurosymbolic and ML engineers, knowledge-graph engineers (Neo4j, RDF, LPG), ontology and schema engineers, data and platform engineers, full-stack product engineers (Next.js, Python). Infrastructure first, interface second. Real problem space. Open where it matters.
Write as an engineerWriting in public
The magazine where we think in public about pluralism, disagreement, and the structure that makes sustainable outcomes possible. The philosophy behind everything TACITUS builds — argued in the open.
Read the magazine“It is the rare fortune of these days that one may think what one likes and say what one thinks.”
— Tacitus, Histories I.1
Join us
If you enjoy reading this. If you work on conflict resolution, mediation, governance, or human friction. If you build the machinery — ontologies, graphs, neurosymbolic systems. If domain-specific structure and context for LLMs makes sense to you. Join us.