ACORN Schemas and Ontologies

The research activity schema organizes identity, metadata, technology context, narrative sections, contact information, and extension notes into one portable record. Field names below follow the serialized JSON, YAML, and ZON form.

Context awareness

ACORN’s context awareness comes from explicit data. A research activity record places its narrative alongside project identity, persistent identifiers, people, organizations, technology, media, and relationships. Linked-data mappings and provenance show how that information connects and where it came from.

Commands use this context for different purposes. acorn check evaluates values against the appropriate schema and rules, acorn format normalizes controlled values, acorn link maps fields to defined ontologies, and acorn export carries the same project information into other formats. Optional model and agent workflows can receive the record, relevant evidence, and validation results as task context.

Draft authoring

RAD can begin as a draft and become stricter as it matures. Input may omit meta.archive and meta.draft; ACORN defaults them to false and true, respectively. Narrative sections may be omitted while draft is true, but a non-draft record must provide them.

List-shaped metadata is also permissive at the authoring boundary. keywords, technology, and every optional metadata vector accept either one item or an array. ACORN normalizes a single item to a one-item array. For optional vectors, an omitted or null value means absent, while [] remains explicitly empty. Canonical JSON, YAML, ZON, and Markdown output uses arrays; empty keywords and technology fields are omitted.

Context-aware operation does not mean that ACORN knows facts absent from its inputs or that it has consciousness. Missing or unsupported information remains missing until a person or a defined provider supplies it. This boundary lets context reveal documented connections and gaps without turning an inference into project data.

Note

See Standards, formats, and interoperability for the metadata models, ISO and RFC representations, field profiles, crosswalks, artifact formats, and protocol boundaries that ACORN implements. Persistent identifier lifecycle documents each local identifier check and resolver boundary.