# Ontonomic

> Ontonomic is a UK-based research and engineering consultancy specialising in ontology engineering for large collections of political and legal text. Partners: Roy Gardner (Senior Partner), Sally Gardner and Callum Wilson. Associate: Matt Martin. Contact: enquiries@ontonomic.com

Ontonomic treats ontologies as engineered artefacts: designed carefully, tested against evidence, maintained over time, and compared on their merits. Designing an ontology and applying it to real documents are treated as inseparable tasks. We combine large language models with ontologies and knowledge graphs, so that AI analysis of text rests on explicit, tested conceptual structure.

## Services

- [Ontology engineering](https://ontonomic.com/#ontology-engineering): build ontologies, code text with LLMs, analyse topic networks. LLM-based coding of text segments against an ontology, with calibration, and analysis of topic networks traceable to the supporting text.
- [Knowledge graphs](https://ontonomic.com/#knowledge-graphs): entity and relation extraction from text, built on domain ontologies and delivered through Graphtensor for querying and analysis.
- [Data infrastructure](https://ontonomic.com/#data-infrastructure): design and engineering of research data platforms, including the CCP Portal for the Comparative Constitutions Project.

## Research

- 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: peace agreements and peace process documents, national security documents, national constitutions, constitutional court decisions, research ethics documentation.
- Programmes: PeaceRep (University of Edinburgh), Comparative Constitutions Project, Concept Integration Lab, Linnaeus, Mapping Security Threats in National Security Documents.

## Applications

- RIDA: an AI retrievability audit tool measuring how visible an academic journal is to AI retrieval and RAG pipelines.
- Graphtensor: a natural language query system for structured research corpora, compiling questions into operations across a knowledge graph and a tensor space.

## Selected publications

- 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
- Neal, A., & Gardner, R. (2026). National Security and Defence Documents Dataset (1987–2025) v3.5. PeaceRep, University of Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/8101
- Neal, A. W., Rogers, L., & Gardner, R. B. (2026). The Shifting Referents of Space Security. In Security and Space. Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529245714.ch011
- Cruz, A., Elkins, Z., Gardner, R., Martin, M., & Moran, A. (2023). Measuring constitutional preferences. PLOS ONE 18(12). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295396
- Gardner, R. (2023). Semantic Analysis to Support Peace Analytics. PeaceRep. https://doi.org/10.7488/era/5252
- Gardner, R., & Bell, C. (2022). Global Realignments: Understanding Peace Process Interventions Through News. PeaceRep. https://doi.org/10.7488/era/5213