The W3C RDF 1.2 stack —RDF-Start, SHACL, SKOS, Prov-O, SPARQL, and ODRL— provides the necessary building blocks to create a graph-based version of holons. A holon itself is an entity that is also a system, based initially upon the work of Arthur Koestler in the 1960s with his work The Ghost in the Machine. A graph version of a holon contains a knowledge graph that describes the entities within given system, a context or event graph that describes the evolution of resources over time, a boundary graph that determines the constraints and rules acting upon the system as well as actions that the system can expose as interfaces when viewed as an entity, and one or more projections that effectively create maps of the system.
While holons have immediate applications with mapping and GIS systems, they are also instrumental in areas as diverse as supply chain management, decision support, narrative media structures, games and simulations and so on. They effectively utilise the graph as state machine, and can be used both in a static mode to describe the evolution of existing historical systems and as mechanisms for creating dynamic system, and they have strong relevance to grounding AI-based conversational and computational system.
The Holon Graph Community Group seeks to promote the development of holon envelope ontologies, architecture and usage. It will also seek to help developers build Holon-specific applications and coordinate meetings and other activities within this developing field. This group will publish Specifications.
w3c-cg/holonGroup's public email, repo and wiki activity over time
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these
conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
Chairs, when logged in, may publish draft and final reports. Please see report requirements.
To make it easy to capture who wants to contribute what, we have prepared a short participation form at the link below. We ask you to fill this out in the coming days so that we can synthesize the information and share at the July 3rd meeting.
Your name, background, and organisational affiliation (if any)
Whether you are interested in a co-chair, admin, editor or working group lead role
What you are hoping to get out of the CG and the respective working groups
Any reference implementations or prior work you would like to contribute
Feedback on the overall charter or approach
A page for each of the currently proposed working groups*, asking for both:
Your interest in a role as Working Team Lead, Heavy Participant or Light Participant
Your broad input and feedback on anything from scope, reference projects, concerns, challenges, questions, interactions with other groups and beyond. We hope for this to be an efficient way to gather thinking at the onset to shape the groups.
Any final input, or input on the “What do we call a tracked entity” question
* Note that within the survey, you will see that the Working Group names and descriptions are represented as the list below, representing some evolution even since the “After the Inaugural: What Comes Next” post was shared on Jun 19. We welcome feedback and questions within the form and/or through this email thread.
At the 3 July meeting, we will share our final proposed structure, discuss any evolutions and hope to formally approve these working groups and their initial chairs.
Current Proposed Structure for Working Groups:
I. Core Architecture
Define the canonical holon model, vocabulary, and reference patterns across implementations
Includes holon model, named graph containers, boundary semantics, the scene/event graph partition structure
II. DataBook Standard
Markdown-based substrate for holon grounding, provenance, and LLM integration
Establish the databook format specification – metadata conventions, code block patterns, and exchange protocols
Posted 19 June 2026 — Kurt Cagle, Acting Chair, W3C Holon Community Group
Thank you to everyone who joined us this morning for the inaugural meeting of the W3C Holon Community Group. Thirty-plus people showing up at 7am Pacific on a public holiday — and staying engaged for nearly two hours — is a strong signal that this work matters to a lot of people across a lot of domains. The conversation in the chat channel alone was remarkable: category theory, biomedical graphs, scene description formats, and active inference all appearing within the first half hour. This is the room we wanted.
The meeting recording, presentation deck, agenda, and transcript are available at the community GitHub repository:
We encourage anyone who missed the session, or who wants to share it with colleagues, to link there directly.
A Terminology Question: What Do We Call a Tracked Entity?
One thread that surfaced clearly during the meeting — in both the presentation and the chat — is that the term agent is badly overloaded and may not serve us well going forward.
It carries at least three incompatible meanings in the communities this group spans: the classical AI / rational-agent sense; the AI tooling sense (autonomous LLM stacks, “agentic” pipelines); and domain-specific senses in biomedical contexts where an agent may be a protein, a peptide, a molecule, or a cell. Using the same word for a tracked entity inside a holon invites confusion from the start.
Several alternatives were raised or suggested:
Participant — neutral, implies being part of a context, but perhaps too passive
Character — maps well to game, media, and narrative theory uses; a character has identity, state, and trajectory through a world. The concern raised is that it skews too strongly toward the entertainment domain.
Actor — has distributed systems baggage (the actor model) as well as theatrical connotations
Subject — perhaps the most promising candidate. In RDF, subject already occupies a precise structural role (the S in an SPO triple). In linguistics and philosophy, a subject is the entity around which predication and action organise. It scales from proteins to player characters to legal persons without strain, and it carries no AI-agent connotations. One caveat worth noting: in medical and legal contexts, “subject” can imply a human under observation or study, with associated ethical weight (research subjects, GDPR data subjects), so we will want to examine how it lands in biomedical and regulatory domains.
This is an open question, not a decision. We will raise it formally at the next meeting on 3 July, but we would very much like to hear your thinking beforehand. Please post to the mailing list at public-cg-holon@w3.org with your candidate and your reasoning — especially if you bring a domain perspective (biomedical, legal, geospatial, gaming, supply chain) that these candidates handle well or handle badly.
Good terminology, established early, saves a great deal of rework later.
Working Groups: Formalising Structure
At the inaugural meeting we proposed the following initial working groups:
I. Core Architecture — holon model, named graph containers, boundary semantics, the scene/event graph partition structure
II. DataBook Standard — the Markdown-based substrate for holon grounding, provenance, and LLM integration
V. Industry Utilisation — domain application patterns across healthcare, media, supply chain, finance, education
VI. Ontology & Heterarchical Alignment — alignment with BFO, UFO, DSRP, and related foundational frameworks
At the 3 July meeting we will be formally approving these working groups and their initial chairs. If you are interested in leading or co-chairing any of these groups, we want to hear from you.
Interest and Participation Form — Coming Shortly
To make it easy to capture who wants to contribute what, we are preparing a short participation form that will ask for:
Your name, background, and organisational affiliation (if any)
Which working groups you want to participate in
Whether you are interested in a chair or editor role
What you are hoping to get out of the CG and the respective working groups
Any reference implementations or prior work you would like to contribute
Watch the mailing list for the link — it will go out before the end of next week, well ahead of the July 3rd meeting, so we can arrive there with a clearer picture of who is doing what.
Next Meeting
Date: Friday, 3 July 2026 Time: 7:00–8:00am Pacific / 10:00–11:00am Eastern / 15:00–16:00 BST Agenda: Will be distributed to the mailing list no later than 48 hours prior.
Agenda items for the July 3rd session are welcome now. If you have something you want to present, demonstrate, or raise for discussion, please send it to the mailing list or contact me directly at kurt.cagle@gmail.com.
Kurt Cagle is a consulting ontologist, knowledge graph architect, and technical author. He serves as Acting Chair of the W3C Holon Community Group and publishes The Ontologist and The Inference Engineer on Substack. Copyright 2026 Kurt Cagle.
The W3C RDF 1.2 stack —RDF-Start, SHACL, SKOS, Prov-O, SPARQL, and ODRL— provides the necessary building blocks to create a graph-based version of holons. A holon itself is an entity that is also a system, based initially upon the work of Arthur Koestler in the 1960s with his work The Ghost in the Machine. A graph version of a holon contains a knowledge graph that describes the entities within given system, a context or event graph that describes the evolution of resources over time, a boundary graph that determines the constraints and rules acting upon the system as well as actions that the system can expose as interfaces when viewed as an entity, and one or more projections that effectively create maps of the system.
While holons have immediate applications with mapping and GIS systems, they are also instrumental in areas as diverse as supply chain management, decision support, narrative media structures, games and simulations and so on. They effectively utilise the graph as state machine, and can be used both in a static mode to describe the evolution of existing historical systems and as mechanisms for creating dynamic system, and they have strong relevance to grounding AI-based conversational and computational system.
The Holon Graph Community Group seeks to promote the development of holon envelope ontologies, architecture and usage. It will also seek to help developers build Holon-specific applications and coordinate meetings and other activities within this developing field. This group will publish Specifications.
This is a community initiative. This group was originally proposed on 2026-06-01 by
Kurt Cagle. The following people supported its creation: Kurt Cagle, Stephane Fellah, Joerg Baach, Yousef Hooshmand, Mathias Vanden Auweele, Brandon Dorman, Mike Topalovich, Jonathon Storm, Zac Ruiz, Scott Carroll, Dan Everett, Bo Lora, Sobha M and Michael Ellerbeck.
W3C’s hosting of this group does not imply endorsement of the activities.
w3c-cg/holon
