How an organisation works
The question people ask: who is responsible for this, which process covers it, which policy applies, which system does it run in, and how is it measured?
What feeds the graph: the organisation chart, process descriptions, policy documents, system inventories, role descriptions, and the corrections people make when the chart is out of date.
What the graph holds
| Class | For example |
|---|---|
Unit, Role |
Claims Operations, the claims lead |
Process, Step, Policy |
first notice of loss, the intake step, the privacy policy that constrains it |
System, Measure |
the claims system a step uses; average days to settle |
Decision, Document |
the reorganisation that changed a unit, and the document that records it |
A role belongs_to a unit and performs a step, a step is part_of a process and precedes the next, a policy constrains a process, a measure measures it, a unit owns it. A decision changes a unit, a role or a process and supersedes the decision before it, so a reorganisation is a dated fact rather than a rewritten chart.
A cited answer
oto query --project org entity "Claims lead"
oto query --project org neighbors "First notice of loss" governs
oto query --project org entity "Claims Operations" --as-of 2026-01-01
The answer to who owns intake is a unit and a role, the date since, and the document that says so. The same question as of last January gets last January's owner.
How it is used
- A new joiner asks the agent who to talk to about a process and gets a role, a unit and a source rather than a guess.
- The operations lead changes a process; the curate check says which measures and policies the change touches.
- Audit asks which policy governed a process on a date.
The commands and the skills
oto init --name "Meridian Organisation" --ontology organization-process --project org
cp ~/docs/org/* org/inbox/ && oto ingest --project org
oto survey --project org
oto serve --project org --http 8765 --view reader # the page-shaped reader instead of the explorer
Skills: build-knowledge-base, ontology-interview when the organisation's own words differ from the starter vocabulary, concierge to answer where the project stands.