Ontonomic

About

Ontonomic is a UK-based research and engineering consultancy specialising in ontology and knowledge engineering for large collections of political and legal text. We combine large language models with ontologies and knowledge graphs, so that AI analysis of text rests on explicit, tested conceptual structure. We work across three strands: services that apply our methods for partners, research into computational methods for text and concept analysis, and applications we build on top of them.

Services

• Ontology engineering — build ontologies, code text with LLMs, analyse topic networks.
• Knowledge graphs — entity and relation extraction from text, built on domain ontologies and delivered through Graphtensor for querying and analysis.
• Data infrastructure — design and engineering of research data platforms. Recent work: the CCP Portal for the Comparative Constitutions Project, serving constitutional events, codings and country data.

Research

Our research develops methods for analysing concepts across large text corpora:

• Sentence-level semantic similarity for text and concept analysis.
• Ontology expansion and comparison, including the SAT method for topic integration.
• Tensor-based analysis of topic co-occurrence across documents.

Corpora studied include peace process documents (peace agreements, implementation reports, and mediation documents), national security documents, national constitutions, constitutional court decisions, and research ethics documentation.

Research programmes we contribute to:

• Linnaeus
• PeaceRep
• Comparative Constitutions Project
• Concept Integration Lab
• Mapping Security Threats in National Security Documents

Applications

Applications we are currently building:

• RIDA — an AI retrievability audit tool that measures how visible an academic journal is to AI retrieval and RAG pipelines, combining metadata, citation-graph and structured-markup signals into a composite index. Includes a web interface for running and reviewing audits.
• Graphtensor — a natural language query system for structured research corpora, compiling questions into operations across a knowledge graph and a tensor space.

People

Roy Gardner. Roy is Ontonomic's senior partner.

Sally Gardner. Sally is a partner and an ontology and knowledge engineer.

Callum Wilson. Callum is a partner and a mathematician and data scientist working with LLMs and tensors.

Matt Martin. Matt is an Ontonomic associate and a political scientist interested in computational methodologies and natural language processing.

Selected Publications

1. Neal, A., & Gardner, R. (2026). National Security and Defence Documents Dataset (1987–2025) v3.5 [Data set]. PeaceRep, University of Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/8101
2. Neal, A. W., Rogers, L., & Gardner, R. B. (2026). The Shifting Referents of Space Security. In Security and Space (pp. 179–194). Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529245714.ch011
3. Gardner, R., Martin, M., Moran, A., Elkins, Z., Cruz, A., & Pérez, G. (2026). Expanding Your Vocabulary: A Framework for Topic Integration in Texts. Social Science Computer Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393261443513
4. Cruz, A., Elkins, Z., Gardner, R., Martin, M., & Moran, A. (2023). Measuring constitutional preferences: A new method for analyzing public consultation data. PLOS ONE, 18(12), e0295396. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295396
5. Gardner, R. (2023). Semantic Analysis to Support Peace Analytics. PeaceRep, University of Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.7488/era/5252
6. Neal, A., Wilson, L., & Gardner, R. (2022). National Security Strategies, Emergent Powers and ‘Sustaining Peace’. PeaceRep, University of Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.7488/era/5212
7. Gardner, R., & Bell, C. (2022). Global Realignments: Understanding Peace Process Interventions Through News. PeaceRep, University of Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.7488/era/5213