Computational social ontology
Computational power for complex questions that outgrow any single discipline — mapping reality from an ontological standpoint, with no energy wasted.
▪ LabOnt — Centre for Ontology · Università degli Studi di Torino
The project
Computational Ontology develops formal, reproducible architectures for the ontological systematization of social, real and ideal objects. It reads social phenomena as complex systems — with a shared conceptual apparatus, two validated diagnostic systems, and a public platform where they converge.
A hermeneutic apparatus that turns any region of reality into a researchable object — organized by the ontology / epistemology / technology triad and the four social domains.
SOCE formalises how democracies naturalise the exclusion of the Other; EMERGENZA models constitutional endurance across generations.
The public platform where the systems converge — reading constitutional systems as complex adaptive systems, with a long-term playable interface.
Architecture
One conceptual engine feeds two diagnostic systems, which converge in a computational platform and point toward advanced simulation.
The apparatus
Every analysis is routed through three instances of truth — Charles Peirce's triad, read ontologically after Ferraris — and interrogated across the four domains of the social system.
Technology bridges knowledge to the real — which is why a computational platform is the natural instrument of this project.
The apparatus is developed in full — grammar, operators, book and open data — at ontology360.it, the matrix of this project.
How are the four domains of the social system shaped by different objects, as human efforts answer the consistent problems of existence — and how does each ideology answer, domain by domain?
Diagnostic systems
Each system applies the apparatus to a concrete region, producing a reproducible structural signature rather than a black-box score.
The Social-Ontological Cycle of Exclusion formalises how democracies naturalise the exclusion of the Other as a five-node recursive cycle — inscription, ideology, imagined community, obedience, alterity — with a structural signature validated across eleven historical cases and five topological families.
Reads constitutions as emergent, transgenerational systems (after Tiziana Andina). The Transgenerational Democracy Risk Analysis Methodology and its Transgenerational Index quantify whether a constitution endures across generations, using survival, diffusion and agent-based models on the Comparative Constitutions Project dataset.
The derivation
Every node below is real and linked: the grammar lives on the matrix, the two systems are derived from it, and each research object carries a DOI. Hover a node; open it to read the record.
For the social theorist: a deposited codebook is what turns a reading of exclusion into something a stranger can repeat — and disagree with — on the same units.
Method & governance
Exploratory use is open. Anyone may apply the published codebook and rubrics to read cases, teach, or probe the model. Canonical diagnosis requires two trained human coders working under the δ-protocol — an exploratory reading is never a validated verdict.
Aligned with Horizon Europe and the EU AI Act: model-agnostic pipelines, inspectable specialization, documented provenance, and human-validated verdicts. AI proposes; humans decide.
How knowledge is produced
Frontier science is curiosity-driven and answers to reality: a model earns its standing by surviving contact with historical evidence, not by internal elegance. That value becomes a concrete pipeline — from epistemology to tested findings.
Realism disciplined by the metaphysics of emergence; fit-for-purpose levels of abstraction; no cosmetic quantification.
SOCE's Φ and EMERGENZA's Transgenerational Index, built with agent-based, system-dynamics, network, survival & diffusion methods.
Two trained coders under the δ-protocol produce a validated reading. AI proposes; humans decide.
Freeze the data at date T, project forward, and compare with the known outcome. Reality is the judge.
Reproducible signatures, hypotheses and early-warning indicators — deposited openly.
Results are checked against large, curated historical datasets and the cliodynamics tradition of quantitative history — the empirical ground truth against which hypotheses and findings are validated.
Open science
Every load-bearing artifact is deposited, versioned and openly licensed. GitHub works · OSF declares · Zenodo freezes · EOSC preserves.
No fees to authors or readers; community-run venues. The project's default aspiration.
The article is open access in the journal itself, where a venue's open option fits.
A preprint or accepted version deposited in an open repository — Zenodo · OSF.
Every research object below travels one of these three open-access roads.
Works under review or in preparation. Titles are listed; venues are withheld while in double-blind review.
Affiliations & collaborations
