Capability is converging
Reasoning, code generation and long-context retrieval get cheaper every quarter.
Your knowledge is the edge a competitor can't license.
A DataGOL manifesto
Meaning Is Infrastructure.
Connecting the data was the easy part. What your company knows is the real asset, and almost none of it is written down.
Plain-text ontologyOKF v0.2Bitemporal by defaultForward deployed engineers
August 2026 · 10 pages · PDF
concepts/arr.mdOKF v0.2
--- concept: arr owner: finance verified_by: revops-lead valid_from: 2026-01-01 links: [contract, invoice, segment] --- # ARR Recognized revenue from active contracts. Amendments count once they are billed.
01 · The shift
Intelligence got cheap. Context didn't.
Every company now has the same models at roughly the same price. The advantage moves to what you feed them.
Every company is already a model
Years of decisions about discounts, exceptions and metrics are tuned weights, stored in people, Slack threads and a file called final_v3_USE_THIS.
When someone leaves, the weights leave too.
Agents get no onboarding
A new hire absorbs the unwritten rules over six months. An agent gets whatever is in front of it right now.
Written meaning makes agent answers right.
The organizations that win the next decade will be the ones whose knowledge is in a form a model can use.
02 · The false summit
Connected data still disagrees.
Lakehouses, connectors and semantic layers put all the data in one place. We build this, and it is necessary.
Two agents can still read the same clean warehouse and return two different numbers. Neither is broken. The organization never wrote down which number it means when it says ARR.
Pipelines move the data. Meaning needs a layer of its own.
"What was Northwind's ARR in Q1?"
Sales agentreads the CRM$1.24MBooked ARR, including the amendment.
Finance agentreads billing$1.09MRecognized revenue. Amendment not yet billed.
Both agents are correct. ARR was never defined.
A shared definition of ARR fixes this.
03 · Plain text
Meaning belongs in plain text.
The people who hold the meaning work in finance, ops and platform teams. So the ontology lives as markdown in version control: reviewed in a pull request, readable by a person, parseable by an agent.
In June 2026 Google published the Open Knowledge Format on the same idea. We implement it, and our runtime enforces access, explains decisions and remembers the past.
Google shipped the format. The runtime is the part we built.
04 · Time
Every number, reproducible in time.
What was true and what we knew are separate questions. Contracts get amended after the fact and accounts get reclassified backwards.
DataGOL stores both by default, so any closed quarter rebuilds exactly as it was believed and every number holds up in front of an auditor.
Order SO-1024: discount tier on 15 January?
Asked on 1 MarchStandardWhat we believed at the time. Every report that quarter used this.
Asked todayEnterpriseThe amendment landed later and applied back to 15 January.
15 JANOrder booked at Standard
1 MARQuarter closed on that belief
10 APRAmendment backdated to 15 Jan
05 · What we commit to
Seven positions we'll be held to.
01
Meaning belongs in plain text
Markdown in version control, readable without tooling, reviewable in a pull request.
02
Open formats you keep
Your ontology walks out as a folder of files any system can read.
03
Architecture fits your constraints
Pipeline shape follows your cost ceiling, latency needs and where your data lives.
04
Every number is reproducible in time
Bitemporal by default, so a closed quarter rebuilds exactly as it was believed.
05
Context compounds
Every correction writes back with provenance attached, so the system improves with use.
06
Governance lives in the system
Access policy, lineage and audit are enforced at query time.
07
Someone stands behind the work
We send engineers. The ontology ships with a name attached to it.
Software forgets
Infrastructure learns.
Every question someone asks makes the next answer better.
06 · The full manifesto
Read the DataGOL manifesto.
All ten pages, including the full argument behind each commitment. Flip through it here or take the PDF with you.
Tip: use the arrow keys to turn pages.
1 / 10
The thesis
The companies that win will be the ones that remember.
Their understanding of their own business is written down, carries its own history, and gets better every time someone asks it a question. That's infrastructure. We're building it.