GMEOW Accounts Module

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

What This Slice Covers

This slice owns 19 terms and contributes 11 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

Consumers

• Online accounts for the mail corpus, email delivery, and finance.

Local Map

Examples

Online Presence

• Source: slices/core/accounts/examples/online-presence.ttl
• GMEOW terms: gmeow:OnlineAccount, gmeow:OnlineService, gmeow:Person, gmeow:accountName, gmeow:accountService, gmeow:accountServiceHomepage, gmeow:accountStatus, gmeow:accountStatusActive, gmeow:accountStatusHistorical, gmeow:activityPubActor
• External prefixes: xsd

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example: online accounts, decentralized identity, and P10. An
# agent gmeow:holdsAccount one or more gmeow:OnlineAccounts, each on a
# gmeow:OnlineService. Decentralized identities are first-class: a Mastodon
# account carries its gmeow:activityPubActor URI, a Nostr account its
# gmeow:nostrPubkey and gmeow:nip05 handle. P10 (suppression, never deletion):
# when a service shuts down, its account is kept as gmeow:accountStatusHistorical
# — the record persists, it is not erased.
@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/accounts/> .
@prefix xsd:   <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .

ex:dana a gmeow:Person ;
    gmeow:name "Dana Reyes"@en ;
    gmeow:holdsAccount ex:fediAccount , ex:nostrAccount , ex:oldAccount .

# --- A live service and a fediverse (ActivityPub) account on it.
ex:mastodon a gmeow:OnlineService ;
    gmeow:name          "mastodon.social"@en ;
    gmeow:serviceStatus gmeow:serviceStatusLive .

ex:fediAccount a gmeow:OnlineAccount ;
    gmeow:accountName            "@dana@mastodon.social" ;
    gmeow:accountService         ex:mastodon ;
    gmeow:accountServiceHomepage <https://mastodon.social> ;
    gmeow:activityPubActor       "https://mastodon.social/users/dana"^^xsd:anyURI ;
    gmeow:accountStatus          gmeow:accountStatusActive .

# --- A serverless Nostr identity: the key IS the account, with a NIP-05 handle.
ex:nostrAccount a gmeow:OnlineAccount ;
    gmeow:accountName   "dana" ;
    gmeow:nostrPubkey   "npub1dana0exampleexampleexampleexampleexampleexampleexa" ;
    gmeow:nip05         "dana@example.org" ;
    gmeow:accountStatus gmeow:accountStatusActive .

# --- P10: a shut-down service keeps its account as historical, never deleted.
ex:defunct a gmeow:OnlineService ;
    gmeow:name                "old.example.net"@en ;
    gmeow:serviceStatus       gmeow:serviceStatusShutDown ;
    gmeow:serviceShutdownDate "2023-06-30T00:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime .

ex:oldAccount a gmeow:OnlineAccount ;
    gmeow:accountName   "dana_old" ;
    gmeow:accountService ex:defunct ;
    gmeow:accountStatus gmeow:accountStatusHistorical .

Terms

Classes

Properties

Individuals

Linkages

• Rows: 11
• Projection profiles: foaf, schema-org, sioc
• External vocabularies: foaf, rdf, schema, sioc

Guide

Accounts — online accounts, centralized and decentralized, as peers

Slice: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/accounts · tier: core The FOAF OnlineAccount superset plus the decentralized-identity layer: handles, Nostr keys, ActivityPub actors, and domain-verified identifiers.

FOAF gave the web foaf:OnlineAccount and then the web moved on: today an agent's online presence spans platform accounts (a code forge, a social service) and decentralized identities (a Nostr keypair, a federated ActivityPub actor) that have no "service provider" in the FOAF sense. GMEOW models both in one class, as co-equal accounts (Principle 9's co-equality stance applied to digital presence): a self-sovereign key-based identity is not an exotic footnote to a platform handle, and a platform handle is not less real for being custodial. There is no primary-account slot, for the same reason names has no primary name — an agent holds many accounts via holdsAccount, and selection is the consumer's frame, never the graph's hierarchy.

An account is an InformationObject, not the agent: the account ≠ agent distinction is load-bearing exactly the way appellation ≠ person is in names. Accounts are claimed by agents, get suspended, abandoned, and reused — facts about the account, not the person. A defunct account is suppressed or time-scoped, never deleted (Principle 10): account history is provenance for everything the mail corpus and the memory products ingest. The slice is deliberately slim (Principle 16's small-core discipline) with named consumers — the mail corpus, email delivery, and finance (Principle 15).

The core pair

gmeow:OnlineAccount

An account an agent holds with an online service — a social profile, a code-forge account, or a decentralized identity. An InformationObject under kernel, so it bears the shared machinery: external identifiers, wasAttributedTo provenance, and statement-level clocks (validFrom/validUntil) for the holding period — flat-first, like the contacts slice's tenures.

gmeow:holdsAccount

Agent → account. Non-functional in both directions by design: an agent holds many accounts, and (honestly modelled) a shared or transferred account relates to more than one agent over time — disambiguate with the statement clocks. No inference runs from an account's display name back to the agent's identity facets: handles are address, not identity (the seven-axis matrix's address ≠ identity tenet, applied to the digital realm).

Identifiers on the account

gmeow:accountName

The handle or user name identifying the account on its service — a service-scoped string, meaningful only paired with the service, and never a name of the person (a person's names are co-equal gmeow:PersonNames in the names slice; an account handle never outranks or implies them).

gmeow:nostrPubkey

The Nostr public key (npub / hex) identifying a key-based, self-sovereign account. The key is the account's identity on the protocol — no provider exists to ask — which is exactly why decentralized accounts needed first-class modelling rather than a stretched FOAF accountServiceHomepage.

gmeow:activityPubActor

The ActivityPub actor IRI of a federated-social account — a dereferenceable identity in fediverse space. Carried as xsd:anyURI data, not conflated with the account's own GMEOW IRI: the actor IRI is what the protocol calls the account, an alignment in the same spirit as language's registry codes — never identity within the graph.

gmeow:nip05

A Nostr NIP-05 identifier (user@domain) verifying a Nostr account against a DNS domain — the protocol's own claim-verification bridge. Recording it lets the trust module (keys, certifications, owner-trust live there, not here) weigh a domain-backed account above an unverified key without this slice ever ranking accounts itself.

ex:kit a gmeow:Person ;
    gmeow:holdsAccount ex:forgeAcct , ex:nostrAcct .   # co-equal

ex:forgeAcct a gmeow:OnlineAccount ;
    gmeow:accountName "kit-dev" .

ex:nostrAcct a gmeow:OnlineAccount ;
    gmeow:nostrPubkey "npub1examplekey…" ;
    gmeow:nip05 "kit@example.ca" .

Seams, solver, and alignment

The contacts slice joins in through gmeow:deliversToAccount (an email address delivers to an account — the seam the mail corpus walks from address book to mailbox), and finance reaches accounts for service relationships. Key verification — checking a NIP-05 document, resolving an ActivityPub actor, proving control of a key — is solver-layer work (Principle 12): the graph records the identifiers and the trust module records the attestations; nothing here computes or asserts verification outcomes. Alignment is by reference (Principle 5): OnlineAccount/holdsAccount/accountName map to FOAF's OnlineAccount/account/accountName, with the decentralized-identity properties as GMEOW's canonical superset — FOAF-bound projections drop them as documented lossy drops (Principle 4).

Dependencies

Depends only on kernel — accounts sit near the bottom of the core stack so that contacts (deliversToAccount), the email extension, and finance can all build on them without cycles. Consumers: the mail corpus, email delivery, and finance (Principle 15, named in the manifest).

Online-presence history

gmeow:OnlineService · gmeow:accountService · gmeow:accountServiceHomepage · gmeow:serviceShutdownDate · gmeow:serviceStatus

The service an account is held with is a first-class gmeow:OnlineService (gmeow:accountService, functional). Its liveness rides the flat gmeow:serviceStatus (live / shut-down) and gmeow:serviceShutdownDate — so a historical service (Yahoo 360, shut 2009-07-13) stays first-class with its shutdown recorded (→ schema:dissolutionDate). gmeow:accountServiceHomepage is FOAF's accountServiceHomepage idiom.

gmeow:AccountStatus · gmeow:accountStatus

The holder's usage status of an account — an open value vocabulary (active / dormant / historical). A retired account is accountStatusHistorical with validUntil in the past, retained for the record (P10), never deleted.