The Iroko Framework

Executive Summary

The Institution: Why Nothing Like This Exists

The preservation of Afro-Atlantic sacred knowledge systems has always been a problem of institutional form.

Western cultural heritage institutions were built on assumptions of public access, neutral description, and institutional custody that are structurally incompatible with traditions governed by initiation, lineage authority, and community-held sovereignty over sacred knowledge. The result has been a century of Afro-Atlantic sacred materials held in institutions that cannot describe them ethically, cannot govern access appropriately, and cannot return them meaningfully even when the political will to do so exists. The materials survive. The institutional infrastructure to steward them does not.

The Iroko Historical Society was founded to build that infrastructure from the ground up.

The Society operates as a postcustodial cultural heritage complex comprising three interconnected components: a digital archive, a research library, and a living museum. Each serves a distinct function. Each holds a distinct relationship to the knowledge under its governance. Together they constitute an institutional form that has no direct precedent in the GLAM world, not because the need is new, but because no institution has previously attempted to hold all three functions under a unified governance logic designed by and for the communities whose knowledge is at stake.

These three components do not simply coexist. They create a set of institutional demands that no single existing standard, vocabulary, or governance framework can address simultaneously. The archive requires field-level access control granular enough to distinguish what may be known about a sacred material from who may access it and under what conditions. The research library requires contested knowledge modeling sophisticated enough to document lineage disputes, variant traditions, and multiple authoritative perspectives without forcing resolution. The living museum requires sovereign agency infrastructure that models community authority, refusal rights, and stewardship mandates as first-class institutional functions rather than policy exceptions.

The Iroko Framework exists because the institution required it. Every module, every access tier, every governance mechanism in the vocabulary was built in direct response to a specific institutional demand that no existing standard could meet. The framework is not a technical contribution that found an application. It is the answer to a question the institution could not survive without asking.

The Problem Existing Standards Cannot Solve

The metadata standards that govern most cultural heritage institutions today were built for a specific kind of institution: a Western archive or library holding materials it owns, describes neutrally, and makes available to credentialed researchers. Dublin Core provides fifteen generic properties sufficient for describing a document, an image, or an artifact in that context. Encoded Archival Description structures finding aids for collections whose access restrictions are administrative rather than sacred. Resource Description and Access governs bibliographic description for materials whose intellectual content is presumed to be separable from the communities that produced them. These are not inadequate standards. They are standards built for a different problem.

Applied to Afro-Atlantic sacred materials, they fail in ways that are structural rather than incidental.

The Access Architecture Failure

Existing standards treat access restriction as a binary or at most a simple tiered condition: public, restricted, closed. A collection is open to researchers, or it requires an appointment, or it is sealed. This is sufficient for a personnel file or a donor agreement. It is insufficient for a sacred corpus where a single object may have a publicly accessible name, a scholarly description available to credentialed researchers, a ritual context visible only to initiates, and preparation or activation knowledge restricted to elders with specific lineage authority. Dublin Core has no property for this. EAD has no element for it. The Iroko Framework has six access tiers applied at the field level, meaning that a single record can simultaneously be public at one property and elder-restricted at another.

The Contested Knowledge Failure

Afro-Atlantic sacred traditions are not monolithic. Lineage disputes, regional variations, diasporic divergences, and the disruptions of the Middle Passage have produced a knowledge landscape where multiple authoritative perspectives on the same entity, practice, or text coexist without resolution. A standard description framework that assigns a single authoritative value to a field cannot represent this reality without falsifying it. The choice of which lineage's version to record as the description is itself an act of authority that the describing institution has no standing to make. EAD and RDA both assume a describable truth. The Iroko Framework assumes contested knowledge as the default condition.

The Agency Failure

Existing standards treat the subjects of description as objects. Dublin Core's creator, subject, and description properties position the institution as the actor and the described entity as passive. This is philosophically untenable for living sacred traditions and practically dangerous for communities whose knowledge has been extracted, commodified, and misrepresented by exactly this kind of institutional description. The Iroko Framework models sacred agents, including spirits, lineage authorities, and community governance bodies, as actors with authorization rights, refusal rights, and stewardship mandates. A spirit can be the authorized source of a restriction. A community council can be the governing body whose consent is required before a record is modified.

The Custody Failure

The dominant archival model assumes that the institution holding materials is their custodian, with authority to describe, provide access to, and make decisions about them. Postcustodial archival theory has challenged this assumption theoretically for decades. The Iroko Historical Society challenges it operationally. The archive, research library, and living museum are not custodians of the knowledge they hold. They are infrastructure through which communities exercise their own custody. No existing standard was designed to make that distinction structurally visible. The Iroko Framework was.

The Framework as Binding

An archive, a research library, and a living museum do not simply have different collections. They have different relationships to knowledge itself. The archive's relationship is custodial and restricted. The research library's relationship is scholarly and mediated. The living museum's relationship is participatory and living. These are not differences of degree. They are differences of kind. An infrastructure that flattens them in the name of interoperability produces a system that is technically functional and institutionally false.

The Iroko Framework holds all three relationships simultaneously through a single architectural decision: the separation of vocabulary publication from data publication. The vocabulary, all 16 modules, 91 classes, 379 properties, 69 concept schemes, and 602 concepts, is fully public, CC0 licensed, and available for adoption by any institution working with Afro-Atlantic sacred materials. The data governed by that vocabulary is not public. It is held at irokosociety.org under API-governed access protocols calibrated to the community authorization frameworks of the traditions represented. Any institution can use the language. Only authorized parties can access what has been said in it.

This separation is the theoretical breakthrough the framework introduces to postcustodial archival practice. Prior frameworks for ethical description of Indigenous and sacred materials have generally operated at the policy level, producing guidelines for how institutions should behave rather than infrastructure for how systems should function. The Local Contexts initiative and the Mukurtu platform have both advanced the conversation significantly. The Iroko Framework builds on that conversation by moving the governance logic out of policy documents and into the ontology itself. The restriction is not a note in a finding aid. It is a property of the record, encoded in RDF, enforced at the field level, and traceable to the community authority that established it.

The binding function of the framework operates at three levels. At the record level, a single described entity, a sacred drum, an odu corpus, a lineage house, can carry properties drawn from multiple modules simultaneously, with each property carrying its own access tier, provenance chain, and community authorization context. At the institutional level, the framework provides a shared descriptive language across three components that would otherwise require three separate systems with no reliable way to relate records across them. At the community level, the framework makes sovereignty operational rather than aspirational: communities are encoded as governing agents whose authorization is structurally required before certain properties can be asserted, modified, or disclosed.

This is what it means to say the framework is the binding of the complex. Remove it, and the archive, the research library, and the living museum are three separate institutions with separate systems, separate vocabularies, and no shared infrastructure for the most important question any of them faces: who has the right to know what about the knowledge in their care, and on whose authority.

Architecture and Design Principles

The Iroko Framework is organized into sixteen modules distributed across three layers: a Foundation layer consisting of the Core module that every other module depends on, a Governance Layer of five composable modules that add sovereignty infrastructure to any domain application, and a Domain Layer of ten tradition-specific vocabularies covering the distinct knowledge domains of Afro-Atlantic sacred practice. The modular architecture is not a design preference. It is a direct response to the institutional reality that different adopting institutions will have different relationships to different knowledge domains, and no institution should be required to implement governance infrastructure it does not need or expose vocabulary it has no standing to use.

The six design principles that govern the framework's architecture each emerged from a specific institutional demand. Understanding them as responses to concrete problems rather than abstract commitments clarifies both what the framework does and why it is designed the way it is.

Together these six principles constitute a coherent design philosophy: governance before description, sovereignty before access, community authority before institutional convenience. The framework's technical sophistication is real and substantial. But the technical decisions are all downstream of the governance decisions, and the governance decisions are all downstream of the communities whose knowledge the framework was built to protect.

The Access Philosophy

This separation is not a compromise between openness and restriction. It is a principled position about what institutions, scholars, and communities each have standing to know, and what infrastructure is required to make those distinctions operational rather than merely aspirational. The full vocabulary is published at ontology.irokosociety.org under a CC0 license. The data governed by that vocabulary at the Iroko Historical Society is held under API-governed access protocols at irokosociety.org, with disclosure determined by the community authorization frameworks embedded in the archive's governance structure.

This distinction resolves a tension that has paralyzed the field of ethical description for decades. Institutions holding Afro-Atlantic sacred materials have faced two bad options: describe everything openly, exposing knowledge that communities have the right to restrict, or describe nothing substantively, producing finding aids so vague they are institutionally useless and academically impenetrable. The Iroko Framework offers a third option. Describe everything with full semantic richness. Govern access to each layer of that description independently. Publish the vocabulary so that the description is interoperable. Protect the data so that the knowledge is sovereign.

The framework accommodates four distinct institutional relationships to this vocabulary, each legitimate, each different, each governable under the same infrastructure. Universities and research institutions work primarily with published ethnographies and public archival holdings, implementing the vocabulary with relatively open access policies while respecting community-restricted tiers for any restricted materials in their collections. Temple archives and community-based institutions apply the same vocabulary with far more stringent access calibrations, with more properties carrying elder-restricted or sacred-secret designations. Museums face a specific version of this challenge: a public exhibition may legitimately describe sacred objects at the public access tier while donor collections or repatriation records require community authorization before disclosure. Researchers working in fieldwork contexts build provenance records that travel with field data through every subsequent institutional context, making governance obligations visible to every future user regardless of where the record ends up.

The Iroko Historical Society's own practice demonstrates what this access philosophy looks like in full implementation. The Society publishes the complete vocabulary with minimal public data: scientific names, vernacular plant names, public conceptual definitions. Sacred knowledge detail is held privately, governed through the API at irokosociety.org, and accessible only to users whose authorization has been established through community protocols. The vocabulary is available to every institution that needs it. The knowledge is available only to those who have standing to access it.

This is the access philosophy the framework embodies. Not open access as a universal value, but governed access as a sovereignty right. Not restriction as institutional caution, but restriction as community authority encoded in infrastructure. The framework does not ask institutions to trust communities. It builds community authority into the system so that trust is not the operative variable.

The Modules: Built by Institutional Necessity

The sixteen modules of the Iroko Framework were not designed speculatively. Each one exists because the institution encountered a specific descriptive problem that no existing vocabulary could solve and that the archive, research library, or living museum could not function without resolving.

Foundation

The Core module (iroko:) is the single module every other module depends on. It establishes the class hierarchy, the six-tier access governance system, the assertion reification mechanism for contested knowledge, and the concept schemes shared across all other modules. Its sixteen classes include foundational types that the institution requires before any domain description is possible: SacredEntity, LineageKnowledgeGraph, ContestedAuthority, DocumentaryEvidence, SacredMedia, Assertion, RitualAuthority, TemporalVariation, AccessPolicy, and FieldworkEvent among them. The Core module also carries a thin narrative spine that the Narrative module builds on, and provenance tracking infrastructure that runs through every subsequent module. Version 2.0.0 additions, Assertion as a superclass, TemporalVariation, and FieldworkEvent, were responses to concrete descriptive problems encountered in practice, not theoretical refinements.

Governance Layer

The five Governance Layer modules are composable. No institution is required to implement all of them. Each declares its dependencies and is designed to degrade gracefully when used without the others. Together they constitute a sovereignty infrastructure that can be layered onto any domain module according to the access requirements of the institution and the community.

The Agency module (ag:) addresses one of the most structurally significant gaps in existing metadata standards: the absence of any mechanism for modeling sacred agents as actors rather than subjects. The institution requires this because the traditions it documents do not recognize a clean separation between human governance and sacred governance. Spirits authorize. Lineage authorities refuse. Divinatory offices transmit. The Agency module models all of these through SacredAgent, Spirit, RitualEvent, AuthorizationEvent, RefusalEvent, AuthorizationChain, and StewardshipMandate without making metaphysical claims about the ontological status of the entities involved. The framework does not assert that spirits exist in any particular sense. It asserts that communities govern their knowledge through authorization structures that include sacred agents, and that those structures must be represented in the infrastructure if the infrastructure is to be honest.

The Authority module (auth:) develops the RitualAuthority stub in Core into a full governance model. Authority types, authority basis, jurisdiction, recognition networks, and temporal validity are all required properties for an institution whose collections span multiple lineages, multiple traditions, and multiple historical periods, each with its own governance structures that may recognize or contest each other's legitimacy.

The Epistemic module (ep:) governs knowledge gating: the question of when, to whom, and under what conditions knowledge may be disclosed, withheld, or restricted. This is distinct from access control, which governs who can retrieve a record. Epistemic governance addresses the prior question of whether certain knowledge should be represented in the record at all. Some sacred knowledge is not simply restricted. It is knowledge whose existence in a record is itself a governance question requiring community authorization. The module's DisclosurePermission, DisclosureRestriction, SanctionedDisclosure, and ConstraintBasis classes make this distinction operational.

The Narrative module (narr:) builds the full narrative modeling layer on the Core module's thin spine. Story transmission chains, contested kinship claims as assertion subtypes, testimonies, fieldnotes, and interpretive stances are all required for an institution whose collections include odu verse traditions, pataki, konte, and equivalent narrative corpora. The module's typed variant relationships make it possible to document the relationships between narrative versions across lineages and geographies without asserting a single authoritative text.

The Manifestation module (mani:) models how sacred agents are asserted to manifest across embodiment, possession, dream, divination, symbolic presence, territorial claim, and auditory sign. It plugs into the Agency module's ManifestationEvent class and supports temporal variation where manifestation modes shift by ritual calendar or cycle. The living museum component requires this because the distinction between how a sacred agent is asserted to manifest in ceremonial practice and how that agent is described in an archival record is a governance distinction the institution must be able to represent structurally.

Domain Modules

The ten domain modules cover the distinct knowledge domains of Afro-Atlantic sacred practice. Each depends on the Core module. Each was built because an existing domain vocabulary either did not exist or could not accommodate the access governance and sovereignty requirements the institution demands.

The Ewe module (ewe:) governs sacred plant knowledge, layering ritual use governance over Darwin Core botanical data. Field-level access control distinguishes scientific names, which are public, from harvest protocols, which are initiated-only, from preparation methods and invocations, which are elder-restricted. Developed from Pierre Verger's ethnobotanical fieldwork corpus, this module serves as the framework's most fully realized proof of concept, demonstrating that the governance architecture functions at the property level across a real and substantial body of knowledge.

The Nkisi module (nkisi:) covers spiritual entities across the full breadth of Afro-Atlantic traditions: Orisa, lwa, mpungo, vodun, egun, Ori, and spirits of place. Camino and path modeling, syncretic identity tracking, spirit kinship relations, and polarity modality are all required properties for an institution whose collections span Lucumi, Haitian Vodou, Palo Monte, Candomble, and related traditions.

The Travay module (travay:) distinguishes recurring ceremonies from threshold initiatory rites, a distinction that carries significant governance implications. Ceremony existence is public. Operational sequences and material details are community-restricted or initiated-only. This property-level access architecture means the institution can describe its living museum's ceremonial calendar for public engagement while governing the knowledge that makes those ceremonies function according to community authorization protocols.

The Ile module (ile:) covers religious houses, lineage structures, initiation genealogy, authority transmission, and schism events. Lineage is not merely biographical context for the materials the institution holds. Lineage is governance. Who initiated whom, through which house, in which lineage, determines the authority basis of every knowledge claim in the archive. The module's SchismEvent class addresses the common institutional problem of collections that document traditions in which lineage disputes have produced contested genealogies and competing authority claims.

The Marca module (marca:) covers divination systems, sacred signs, reading records, and verse corpora. It addresses the Ifa corpus specifically, with infrastructure for all 256 odu, as well as Diloggun, Fa, Obi, and Chamalongo. Sign names are public. Verse texts and reading details are restricted. The Ifa corpus is one of the most extensively documented sacred knowledge systems in the Afro-Atlantic world and one of the most actively governed by the communities that hold it. The module makes it possible to describe the corpus with full scholarly richness while honoring the governance structures that Babalawo communities have maintained over their knowledge for centuries.

The Ekpe module (ekpe:) covers initiatory societies, graded initiation systems, esoteric governance structures, and masquerade traditions. Its scope includes Ekpe and Ngbe, Abakua, Ogboni, Oro, Gelede, Egungun, Poro, and Sande. These are among the most governance-intensive knowledge systems in the Afro-Atlantic world. The module models institutional structure, society lodges, society grades, society titles, membership records, and masquerade traditions without exposing restricted grade content or member identities. This is a technically and ethically demanding requirement that no existing vocabulary addresses.

The Veve module (veve:) covers graphic sign systems across the full breadth of Afro-Atlantic traditions: veve, firmas, pontos riscados, Anaforuana, Nsibidi, Adinkra, and Kongo cosmograms. Sign form, function, drawing medium, surface, permanence, and lineage corpus are all required properties for an institution whose collections include both archival documentation of graphic sign systems and living museum contexts where those signs are actively used in ceremonial practice.

The Ngoma module (ngoma:) covers sacred music, rhythms, consecrated instruments, drum set lineages, and musician authority transmission. It addresses Lucumi bata with Ana, Vodou Rada and Petwo drumming, Candomble atabaques, and Palo nkomo, linking to the Core module's SacredMedia properties for audio records. Consecrated instruments are sacred agents with their own governance structures, initiation genealogies, and authority transmission chains. The Ngoma module makes it possible to describe them as such.

The Sankofa module (sankofa:) covers reclamation movements, diaspora returns to African source communities, and reconstructed practice. Its most significant design decision is the modeling of heritage relationships as assertion subtypes rather than factual claims, meaning that multiple perspectives on the relationship between a diaspora practice and its claimed source tradition are documented without adjudicating authenticity.

The Qal module (qal:) covers sacred lexicons, liturgical languages, and esoteric terminology. Its name is taken from the Ge'ez word for "word," ቃል, a naming decision that reflects the module's scope and the institution's recognition that Afro-Atlantic sacred language traditions extend beyond the Caribbean Atlantic into the Ethiopian and Eritrean Christian manuscript traditions. The module integrates OntoLex-Lemon for multilingual lexicographic infrastructure and covers Lucumi, Kikongo, Haitian Kreyol sacred register, Fon/Ewe, and Ge'ez. SecretName is a first-class class in the module, reflecting the governance reality that in many traditions the complex documents, certain names may not be represented in any public record regardless of the describer's knowledge of them.

The Institutional Landscape

The Iroko Framework was built to serve the Iroko Historical Society. It is published to serve a field.

The institutions that hold Afro-Atlantic sacred materials are numerous, diverse, and almost universally under-equipped to describe, govern, and provide access to those materials ethically. The problem is not a shortage of goodwill. Major research universities, national archives, and encyclopedic museums have all made public commitments to ethical stewardship of Indigenous and diaspora collections in the past decade. The problem is infrastructure. Commitments made at the policy level cannot be honored at the operational level without vocabulary, governance mechanisms, and access architecture designed for the specific demands of the materials in question.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities with African diaspora collections represent the most urgent adoption case. Institutions like Howard University, Spelman College, Fisk University, and Dillard University hold collections of Afro-Atlantic religious, cultural, and historical materials accumulated over more than a century. Many of these collections have never been fully described. Others have been described using general-purpose schemas that flatten the sacred and governance dimensions of the materials entirely. The Iroko Framework gives them a vocabulary designed for them.

Caribbean national archives face a version of this challenge shaped by the specific histories of the societies they serve. Cuba's national archive system holds extensive documentation of Afro-Cuban religious communities, cabildos, and initiatory societies accumulated under colonial, republican, and revolutionary administrations. Haiti's archival infrastructure holds materials whose sacred dimensions are inseparable from their historical significance. Trinidad, Jamaica, Brazil, and Colombia each have national collections that include Afro-Atlantic sacred materials described under frameworks that serve neither scholars nor communities adequately.

Museum repatriation programs are encountering the Iroko Framework's problem set from a different institutional direction. The global movement toward repatriation of sacred and culturally sensitive objects has accelerated significantly, producing a situation where institutions are committed to returning materials they do not know how to describe in terms that communities would recognize as accurate, relevant, or respectful. Repatriation is not simply a logistical problem. It requires documentation of provenance, community governance context, sacred function, and authority transmission chains that general-purpose museum collection management systems cannot produce.

Theological seminaries and religious studies programs with African and diaspora collections occupy a specific niche that the framework addresses through its Marca, Qal, and Ekpe modules in particular. The Ifa corpus, the Vodou liturgical tradition, and the esoteric governance systems of initiatory societies have all attracted serious scholarly attention from institutions whose descriptive frameworks were developed for Christian and Near Eastern textual traditions. The Qal module's integration of OntoLex-Lemon and its explicit accommodation of Ge'ez alongside Lucumi and Kikongo signals the framework's scope to institutions working at the intersection of Afro-Atlantic and African Christian manuscript traditions.

The Iroko Historical Society itself is the demonstration case for the full institutional landscape. The complex does not simply use the framework. It was built with the framework as its binding infrastructure, and its operational experience across all three components constitutes the most comprehensive test of the framework's descriptive adequacy and governance performance available. Institutions considering adoption do not need to imagine what implementation looks like. They can observe it.

What Support Enables

The Iroko Framework is complete. The vocabulary is published, versioned, and available for adoption. The Iroko Historical Society is operational. What does not yet exist at the scale the field requires is the implementation infrastructure, community partnership network, and institutional capacity to move the framework from a published vocabulary into the governing standard for Afro-Atlantic sacred knowledge description across the GLAM ecosystem. That is what support enables.

What connects all three phases is a single principle that runs through every component of the work: the communities whose knowledge is at stake are not the beneficiaries of this project. They are its governing authorities. Support for the Iroko Historical Society and the Iroko Framework is not philanthropy directed toward a vulnerable community. It is investment in infrastructure that those communities have already built, that is already functioning, and that is ready to serve the field at a scale the field has never previously had access to.

Conclusion

Afro-Atlantic sacred knowledge systems have survived the Middle Passage, colonial suppression, institutional neglect, and a century of extraction by scholars and institutions that described them without governing them, published them without authorizing them, and preserved them without serving the communities that held them. That survival is not incidental. It is the result of deliberate, sophisticated, community-governed strategies for maintaining sovereignty over knowledge under conditions designed to eliminate it. The traditions are not fragile. The infrastructure to steward them in the digital age has been.

The Iroko Historical Society and the Iroko Framework together represent the first attempt to build that infrastructure from the inside out: a postcustodial cultural heritage complex designed by practitioners with the standing to design it, governed by the communities with the authority to govern it, and built on a semantic vocabulary sophisticated enough to honor the complexity of what it describes. The archive exists. The research library exists. The living museum exists. The framework that binds them exists, is published, is versioned, is standards-aligned, and is ready for adoption by every institution in the world that holds Afro-Atlantic sacred materials and does not yet have the infrastructure to steward them responsibly.

This is not a proposal for something that might be built. It is a case for supporting something that has been built and that the field now needs to use.

The scale of the unmet need is not abstract. There are sacred drums in university storage rooms described as percussion instruments. There are initiatory lineage documents in national archives filed as miscellaneous correspondence. There are odu verse collections in library special collections catalogued under folklore. There are consecrated objects in museum storage whose community governance contexts have never been recorded because no vocabulary existed to record them. The materials survived. The description failed them. The Iroko Framework exists to end that failure, and the Iroko Historical Society exists to demonstrate what ending it looks like in practice.

Technical Reference

A.1 Module Index

A.2 Namespace Declarations

# Foundation
@prefix iroko:   <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-core#> .
# Governance Layer
@prefix ag:      <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-agency#> .
@prefix auth:    <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-authority#> .
@prefix ep:      <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-epistemic#> .
@prefix narr:    <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-narrative#> .
@prefix mani:    <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-manifestation#> .
# Domain Layer
@prefix ewe:     <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-ewe#> .
@prefix nkisi:   <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-nkisi#> .
@prefix travay:  <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-travay#> .
@prefix ile:     <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-ile#> .
@prefix marca:   <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-marca#> .
@prefix ekpe:    <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-ekpe#> .
@prefix veve:    <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-veve#> .
@prefix ngoma:   <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-ngoma#> .
@prefix sankofa: <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-sankofa#> .
@prefix qal:     <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-qal#> .

A.3 Standards Alignment

A.4 Access Level Definitions

Sample RDF

Two primary examples are provided. The first illustrates field-level access control using the Ewe module, demonstrating how a single plant record carries properties at multiple access tiers simultaneously. The second illustrates contested knowledge modeling using assertion reification in the Ile module, demonstrating how competing lineage claims coexist in the same record without forcing resolution. A third brief example illustrates the Agency module's RefusalEvent class.

B.1 Field-Level Access Control: Ewe Module

This example describes a single sacred plant record for Osun Wewe, an aquatic plant central to Lucumi ritual practice. Five properties are asserted at five different access levels in the same record, from public scientific identification through elder-restricted activation protocol.

@prefix iroko:  <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-core#> .
@prefix ewe:    <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-ewe#> .
@prefix dwc:    <http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/> .
@prefix prov:   <http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#> .
@prefix xsd:    <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

# Single plant record; five access tiers on five properties
iroko:plant-osun-wewe a ewe:Plant ;

    # Tier 0 — public unrestricted
    dwc:scientificName          "Ceratopteris pteridoides" ;
    dwc:vernacularName          "Osun Wewe" ;
    iroko:minimumAccessLevel    iroko:public-unrestricted ;

    # Tier 1 — public with cultural context
    ewe:ritualAssociation        iroko:concept-osun ;
    iroko:minimumAccessLevel    iroko:public-contextual ;

    # Tier 3 — initiated only
    ewe:harvestProtocol          iroko:protocol-osun-wewe-harvest ;
    iroko:minimumAccessLevel    iroko:initiated ;

    # Tier 4 — initiated elder
    ewe:preparationMethod        iroko:preparation-osun-wewe-omiero ;
    iroko:minimumAccessLevel    iroko:initiated-elder ;

    # Tier 5 — sacred secret; not disclosed regardless of credentials
    ewe:activationProtocol       iroko:activation-osun-wewe ;
    iroko:minimumAccessLevel    iroko:sacred-secret ;

    prov:wasDerivedFrom          iroko:fieldwork-verger-1995 ;
    iroko:communityEndorsement  iroko:endorsement-ile-ifa-havana-2019 .

B.2 Contested Knowledge Modeling: Ile Module

This example models a lineage dispute between two Lucumi houses over the correct transmission sequence for a specific religious office. Both claims are documented with full provenance. Neither is adjudicated. The ContestedAuthority record names both competing assertions, marks the dispute as unresolved, and attributes resolution authority to the relevant community council.

@prefix iroko:  <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-core#> .
@prefix ile:    <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-ile#> .
@prefix auth:   <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-authority#> .
@prefix xsd:    <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

# The contested religious office
iroko:office-oba-oriaté a ile:ReligiousOffice ;
    iroko:minimumAccessLevel     iroko:community-restricted ;
    iroko:hasContestedAuthority  iroko:authority-dispute-oriaté-transmission .

# Assertion from Havana lineage
iroko:assertion-oriaté-havana a iroko:Assertion ;
    iroko:assertedBy         iroko:authority-ile-ocha-havana ;
    iroko:assertionBasis     auth:lineage-succession ;
    iroko:assertionDate      "1987-03-14"^^xsd:date ;
    iroko:assertedProperty   ile:transmissionSequence ;
    iroko:assertedValue      iroko:sequence-oriaté-havana ;
    iroko:fieldworkSource    iroko:fieldwork-event-havana-2004 ;
    iroko:minimumAccessLevel iroko:community-restricted ;
    iroko:conflictsWith      iroko:assertion-oriaté-matanzas .

# Assertion from Matanzas lineage
iroko:assertion-oriaté-matanzas a iroko:Assertion ;
    iroko:assertedBy         iroko:authority-ile-ocha-matanzas ;
    iroko:assertionBasis     auth:lineage-succession ;
    iroko:assertionDate      "1962-09-08"^^xsd:date ;
    iroko:assertedProperty   ile:transmissionSequence ;
    iroko:assertedValue      iroko:sequence-oriaté-matanzas ;
    iroko:fieldworkSource    iroko:fieldwork-event-matanzas-2007 ;
    iroko:minimumAccessLevel iroko:community-restricted ;
    iroko:conflictsWith      iroko:assertion-oriaté-havana .

# Dispute record — resolution attributed to community council
iroko:authority-dispute-oriaté-transmission a iroko:ContestedAuthority ;
    iroko:disputedProperty     ile:transmissionSequence ;
    iroko:competingAssertion   iroko:assertion-oriaté-havana ;
    iroko:competingAssertion   iroko:assertion-oriaté-matanzas ;
    iroko:resolutionStatus     iroko:unresolved ;
    iroko:resolutionAuthority  iroko:community-council-lucumi ;
    iroko:minimumAccessLevel   iroko:community-restricted .

B.3 Sovereign Agency: RefusalEvent

This example illustrates the Agency module's RefusalEvent class. The refusal event itself is public. The knowledge that was refused is not represented anywhere in the system. An institution using the framework cannot accidentally expose what a community has explicitly declined to share. The refusal is the record. The record honors it.

@prefix iroko:  <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-core#> .
@prefix ag:     <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-agency#> .
@prefix auth:   <https://ontology.irokosociety.org/vocab/iroko-authority#> .
@prefix xsd:    <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

iroko:refusal-ngoma-ana-2019 a ag:RefusalEvent ;
    ag:refusalDate       "2019-11-03"^^xsd:date ;
    ag:refusingAuthority iroko:authority-ilu-batá-havana ;
    ag:refusalBasis      auth:sacred-governance ;
    ag:refusalScope      iroko:property-ana-consecration-protocol ;
    ag:refusalRecordedBy iroko:fieldwork-event-havana-2019 ;
    ag:refusalNote       "The Ana consecration protocol was explicitly
                         declined for documentation by the presiding
                         authority. This refusal record is maintained
                         as provenance. The knowledge is not
                         represented in any record." ;
    iroko:minimumAccessLevel iroko:public-unrestricted .

Institutional Architecture Diagram

The diagram below illustrates the complete architecture of the Iroko Historical Society and the Iroko Framework as its binding infrastructure. Read top to bottom: community sovereignty as governing authority, flowing through the framework's three module layers, into the three institutional components with their distinct access requirements, through the six-tier access architecture, and down to the standards alignment layer that ensures interoperability with the broader GLAM ecosystem.