GMEOW Contacts Module

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

What This Slice Covers

This slice owns 40 terms and contributes 59 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/accounts
• gmeow:slices/agreements
• gmeow:slices/kernel
• gmeow:slices/observations
• gmeow:slices/places
• gmeow:slices/temporal

Consumers

• The mail corpus's address book; email-address structure (core half of the email split).

Local Map

Examples

Contact Points

• Source: slices/core/contacts/examples/contact-points.ttl
• GMEOW terms: gmeow:ContactPoint, gmeow:EmailAddress, gmeow:Organization, gmeow:Person, gmeow:PostalAddress, gmeow:addressLocality, gmeow:addressPlace, gmeow:addressRegion, gmeow:addressValue, gmeow:contactPointProvider

# SPDX-FileCopyrightText: 2026 Blackcat Informatics® Inc. <paudley@blackcatinformatics.ca>
# SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-4.0
#
# Worked example: contact details are flat-first, reified on demand ( P4).
# A bare gmeow:email / gmeow:telephone on the agent covers the common case. When
# a contact point carries a TYPE (work vs personal), a PROVIDER, structured parts
# or a postal frame, it is promoted to a reified gmeow:ContactPoint reached via
# gmeow:hasContactPoint. A gmeow:PostalAddress is expressed in an explicit postal/
# administrative REFERENCE FRAME (P11): its street/locality/region components are
# coordinate values along that frame's axes — the as-written surface form, kept
# distinct from the resolved geographic Place (gmeow:addressPlace).
@prefix gmeow: <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/> .
@prefix ex:    <https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/examples/contacts/> .

ex:acme a gmeow:Organization ; gmeow:name "Acme Robotics Inc."@en .

ex:dana a gmeow:Person ;
    gmeow:name      "Dana Reyes"@en ;
    gmeow:email     "dana@example.org" ;        # flat shortcut — the common case
    gmeow:telephone "+1-555-0142" ;             # flat shortcut
    gmeow:hasContactPoint ex:workEmail , ex:homeAddress .

# --- Reified email: typed, provider-scoped, and split into its parts.
ex:workEmail a gmeow:EmailAddress ;
    gmeow:addressValue         "dana@acme.example" ;
    gmeow:localPart            "dana" ;
    gmeow:domainPart           "acme.example" ;
    gmeow:contactPointType     gmeow:contactPointTypeWork ;
    gmeow:contactPointProvider ex:acme .

# --- Reified postal address: components are coordinates in the postal frame (P11).
ex:homeAddress a gmeow:PostalAddress ;
    gmeow:contactPointType   gmeow:contactPointTypePersonal ;
    gmeow:postalAddressFrame gmeow:referenceFramePostalAddress ;
    gmeow:streetAddress      "742 Evergreen Terrace" ;
    gmeow:addressLocality    "Springfield" ;
    gmeow:addressRegion      "Oregon" ;
    gmeow:postalCode         "97403" ;
    gmeow:countryCode        "US" .

Terms

Classes

Properties

Individuals

Linkages

• Rows: 59
• Projection profiles: foaf, schema-org, sioc, vcard
• External vocabularies: foaf, rdf, rel, schema, sioc, vcard, wd

Guide

Contacts — channels, addresses, and ties that carry their own time

Slice: https://blackcatinformatics.ca/gmeow/slices/contacts · tier: core Contact points (email, telephone, postal), temporally-scoped contact relationships, and the reified interpersonal-relationship relator — the schema.org / vCard / REL superset.

An address book flattens three different things into rows: channels (an email address, a phone number), tenure (who held that address, when — people acquire and relinquish addresses), and ties (who knows whom, in what capacity, over what period). GMEOW models each honestly. Channels are first-class ContactPoint objects; tenure and ties follow the flat-first, reify-on-demand pattern — flat shortcuts carry their period at the statement level with the temporal slice's validFrom/validUntil clocks (Principles 2–3), and promote to a relator (InterpersonalRelationship, AddressTenure) when the fact itself needs identity, evidence, or confidence. A postal address, meanwhile, is frame-relative (Principle 11): its components are coordinate values along the axes of the postal reference frame — the as-written surface form — kept apart from the resolved, identifier-bearing place hierarchy it denotes.

This slice is the superset layer over schema.org ContactPoint/PostalAddress, vCard, and the REL vocabulary (Principle 5: model it correctly, bridge by reference); identity trust between contacts (keys, certifications, owner-trust) lives in the cross-cutting trust module, and the email message model lives in the email extension — this slice is the contact half of the slice-dependency doctrine email split.

Channels

gmeow:ContactPoint

A means of reaching an agent, attached via hasContactPoint. Three subkinds: EmailAddress, TelephoneNumber, PostalAddress. The flat gmeow:email / gmeow:telephone literals remain for the 80 % case where the channel needs no structure — flat-first, never the only form.

gmeow:EmailAddress

The structured channel: addressValue (the normalized addr-spec), localPart, domainPart — all functional. deliversToAccount is the seam to the accounts slice: an address is held by an agent; the account it delivers to is where messages reside. The mail corpus's address book is this slice's named consumer (Principle 15). Envelope display names and internationalized addresses are tracked by the design and land here.

gmeow:PostalAddress

An address expressed in a reference frame (postalAddressFrame, functional — exactly one frame, default referenceFramePostalAddress). Its components — streetAddress, extendedAddress, postOfficeBox, addressLocality, addressRegion, postalCode, countryCode — are coordinate values along that frame's axes: the as-written form, all non-functional because multi-source values conflict and must coexist ("CA" / "Canada" / "CAN" are three records, not one truth).

gmeow:addressPlace

The seam from surface form to geography: the gmeow:Place an address denotes (typically the premises), from which containedInPlace* climbs the resolved, QID-bearing place hierarchy with its coordinates, geometry, and external identifiers. Geocoding — turning the written form into that place — is solver work, never an asserted equivalence (Principle 12).

Tenure

gmeow:AddressTenure

The reified, time-scoped fact that an agent held a contact point over an interval — a TimeScopedRelation with functional tenuredContactPoint and addressHolder. Use it when the holding itself needs identity (a shared mailbox's succession of owners, an address recycled across people — the mail corpus's hard cases); otherwise annotate hasContactPoint with the statement clocks.

Ties

gmeow:hasMet · gmeow:hasWorkedWith · gmeow:hasUsed · gmeow:hasAgreement

The flat shortcuts (the REL-superset layer). hasMet/hasWorkedWith are symmetric agent-agent records; hasUsed reaches any entity; hasAgreement joins an agent to an agreement it is party to — the party-ship period rides this statement, while the agreement's own term lives on the Agreement (no double-modelling). All carry their period with validFrom/validUntil on the statement, exactly as the gmeow store keeps valid_from/valid_until per claim.

gmeow:InterpersonalRelationship

The promoted form: a standing tie as a gufo:Relator (mediating and existentially depending on its players — the same idiom as genealogy's KinRelationship and names' NameUsage), for when the tie must bear its own interval, confidence, or evidence. Subkinds ProfessionalRelationship (reified hasWorkedWith) and AcquaintanceRelationship (reified hasMet).

gmeow:relationshipParty · gmeow:relationshipInterval

relationshipParty is non-functional — typically two parties, deliberately open for group ties; the EL mediation axiom (relator-mediation doctrine) makes "a relationship mediates at least one agent" a reasoner-visible fact, while the closed-world "exactly two" is SHACL's job (SHACL closure gate). relationshipInterval carries the tie's period as a first-class TimeInterval (relators carry intervals this way; duringInterval is reserved for situation-based time-scoped relations).

ex:tie a gmeow:ProfessionalRelationship ;
    gmeow:relationshipParty ex:ada , ex:grace ;
    gmeow:relationshipInterval ex:i1998to2004 ;
    gmeow:confidence 0.9 .                     # the promoted form earns evidence

Solver and alignment notes

Address normalization, geocoding, and frame conversion are computations outside the logic (Principle 12): the slice stores the as-written coordinates and the denoted place; nothing asserts that two written variants "are" the same address. Projections downcast to vcard:ADR / schema:PostalAddress (flat strings reassembled from the coordinate values) and the flat ties to the REL vocabulary; the frame indirection and the statement clocks are canonical and survive only here (Principle 4).

Dependencies

Depends on kernel, temporal (clocks, intervals, TimeScopedRelation), places (addressPlace and the place hierarchy), accounts (deliversToAccount), agreements, and observations. Consumed by the mail corpus's address book and the email extension.

Contact-point usage

gmeow:ContactPointType · gmeow:contactPointType · gmeow:contactPointProvider

The usage role of a contact point — personal, work, personal-domain, support — is an open value vocabulary (gmeow:ContactPointType, P9), bound by gmeow:contactPointType (non-functional: a point may serve several roles). gmeow:contactPointProvider (range gmeow:Agent, to avoid a contacts→organization dependency) is the issuing/scoping agent — the employer behind a work address, the provider behind an email's domain. A retired contact point keeps gmeow:validUntil in the past (P10), never deletion. Projects to schema:contactType and the vCard TYPE parameter.