GMEOW Agreements Module

• IRI: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/agreements
• Tier: core
• Group: core

What This Slice Covers

This slice owns 5 terms and contributes 1 mapping or projection rows. Use it when its terms match the native fact you want to preserve; use the linkage tables to see how those facts leave GMEOW for consumer vocabularies.

Dependencies

• gmeow:slices/kernel
• gmeow:slices/names

Consumers

• Licences-as-agreements (rights), employment terms, and calendar RSVPs.

Local Map

Examples

Employment Contract

• Source: slices/core/agreements/examples/employment-contract.ttl
• GMEOW terms: gmeow:Agreement, gmeow:AgreementName, gmeow:Contract, gmeow:Membership, gmeow:Organization, gmeow:Person, gmeow:foundedOn, gmeow:fullName, gmeow:hasAgreementName, gmeow:hasParty
• External prefixes: gufo

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example: an agreement as a relator. A gmeow:Agreement (here a
# gmeow:Contract, the legally-enforceable specialization) is a gufo:Relator that
# binds its parties via gmeow:hasParty — the agreement IS the relationship, not a
# property of either party. It bears a structured gmeow:AgreementName (an
# Appellation, so multilingual co-equal titles are first-class). Other relators
# can be gmeow:foundedOn it: the employment Membership below exists BECAUSE of the
# contract, so its grounding is recorded rather than assumed.
@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/agreements/> .

ex:acme a gmeow:Organization ; gmeow:name "Acme Robotics Inc."@en .
ex:dana a gmeow:Person ; gmeow:name "Dana Reyes"@en .

# --- The contract: a relator binding the two parties, bearing a formal name.
#     (Validity bounds — gmeow:validFrom/validUntil — are statement-level RDF-1.2
#     annotations, carried in the statement layer rather than as A-box triples.)
ex:contract a gmeow:Contract ;
    gmeow:hasParty         ex:acme , ex:dana ;
    gmeow:hasAgreementName ex:contractName .

ex:contractName a gmeow:AgreementName ;
    gmeow:fullName "Acme Robotics — Reyes Employment Agreement (2026)"@en .

# --- The employment Membership is FOUNDED ON the contract: it exists because of
#     it, so the grounding relator points at the agreement rather than assuming it.
ex:employment a gmeow:Membership ;
    gmeow:membershipMember       ex:dana ;
    gmeow:membershipOrganization ex:acme ;
    gmeow:foundedOn              ex:contract .

Terms

Classes

Properties

Linkages

• Rows: 1
• Projection profiles: -
• External vocabularies: schema

Guide

Agreements — the relator that grounds every binding

Slice: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/agreements · tier: core Mutual understandings reified as relators — and the foundedOn hook that lets every other relator say why it binds.

A flat partyA contractsWith partyB triple cannot carry a date, a clause, a name, or a dispute. GMEOW therefore models an agreement the way UFO says it should be modelled: as a relator (gufo:Relator) — a first-class truthmaker that binds its parties rather than a predicate that merely connects them. The agreement node owns its identity, its appellations, its temporal scope (statement-layer clocks), and its provenance; the parties hang off it via gmeow:hasParty.

The slice is deliberately small because its real surface is everything else: in UFO, a relator is founded on a set of commitments, and gmeow:foundedOn makes that foundation explicit and reusable. A Membership, a KinRelationship by adoption, an employment tenure, a licence — any relator anywhere in the graph can declare the agreement that grounds it, instead of duplicating contractual structure per slice. Legal enforceability is a specialization, not a property flag: gmeow:Contract is the SubKind for agreements a legal system will enforce, and the handshake deal stays an honest gmeow:Agreement.

The relator core

gmeow:Agreement

A mutual understanding between two or more agents that creates obligations or rights, reified as a gufo:Kind relator connecting its parties. Anything from a treaty to a verbal promise; when the terms themselves need deontic structure, link a RightsStatement (rights slice) rather than widening this class.

gmeow:Contract

The legally enforceable SubKind of gmeow:Agreement. Enforceability is the identity-bearing distinction — not a boolean on Agreement — so contract-specific machinery (governing law, execution, breach events) has a typed home without burdening informal agreements.

gmeow:hasParty

Binds the agreement to each gmeow:Agent it obligates. Non-functional and repeated: one statement per party, any arity. Roles within the agreement (licensor/licensee, employer/employee) belong to the consuming relator or a Participation, not to new subproperties here.

gmeow:AgreementName

An gmeow:Appellation SubKind for the formal title, short name, or multilingual version of an instrument ("CETA", "Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement"). Each name is a first-class object carrying its own gmeow:nameLanguage and gmeow:nameScript, so co-equal multilingual names coexist instead of fighting over one literal (Principle 9 — no primaryName).

gmeow:foundedOn

The cross-cutting hook: any gufo:Relator → the gmeow:Agreement that grounds it — UFO's foundation-on-commitments made a queryable edge. This is how licences-as-agreements (rights slice), employment terms, and calendar RSVPs all resolve to one contractual spine instead of three parallel ones.

Worked shape

ex:ceta a gmeow:Contract ;
    gmeow:hasParty ex:canada, ex:europeanUnion ;
    gmeow:hasAppellation ex:cetaShortName .

ex:membership-ca-ceta a gmeow:Membership ;
    gmeow:foundedOn ex:ceta .

The membership relator carries the tenure; the contract carries the binding; neither duplicates the other.

Solver layer & deferred alignment

The ontology asserts who is bound and on what foundation — nothing more. Obligation fulfillment, breach detection, term expiry, and clause interpretation are solver-layer computations over the relator plus its rights statements and statement-layer clocks (Principle 12); the graph never carries an isInBreach flag for the same reason the deception slice carries no isFalse. No mapping profile ships yet: alignment by reference (schema.org's agreement-adjacent terms, FIBO contracts) is deliberately deferred to the alignment window, where it lands as SSSOM rows rather than imported axioms.

Dependencies

Depends on kernel (Agent, the relator grounding) and names (Appellation, for AgreementName). Consumed by rights (licences are agreements), employment (terms of engagement), and calendar (RSVPs as lightweight agreements) — each via gmeow:foundedOn, never by re-modelling the contract.