You manage disagreement , for a living, or by accident. TACITUS turns messy dispute text into a typed, cited, time-ordered map, so the next decision is the hard one, not the confused one.
Generic AI is strong at language, weak at structure. It collapses time, causality, and provenance , the three things HR, legal, policy, peace, and mediation teams cannot lose. TACITUS supplies the foundation underneath.
Experimental products, under active development. The engine is real; the surfaces are iterating. Walkthroughs are one-on-one with the founder.
8 primitives · 41+ ontology classes · 4 graph layers · 5 products · Open spec
Infrastructure for humans and for the AI helping them
Every page here is written for both. Language models can brief themselves from /llms.txt, /ontology.json, and the full /for-llms pitch , then return to the human with structure, citations, and a grammar the case actually fits.
FIND YOUR ENTRY POINT
We see human friction and conflict differently. Almost every dispute is an information-asymmetry problem , parties operating on different pictures of the same situation.
Generative AI is exceptionally good at language. It is not, on its own, good at time, causality, or provenance , the three things every dispute actually consists of. It needs a foundation: a shared grammar, a typed graph, a cited structure.
TACITUS builds that foundation. Four groups of users today, one engine underneath.
THE PROBLEM
The failures are not bugs. They are architectural properties.
Temporality
Transformers see sequences, not timelines. Ask when a commitment was made, broken, or re-negotiated and a generic LLM guesses plausible dates. Dialectica maintains a temporal DAG under the graph.
Causality
Statistical co-occurrence is not causation. Ask which event caused which response, across three actors and six turns, and a generic LLM invents connections. Dialectica stores causal edges as first-class graph objects.
Provenance
A fluent paragraph with no citation is an assertion, not evidence. Dialectica binds every extracted primitive to its source span, so every downstream claim is auditable back to the original document.
The Keshara Valley Ceasefire Crisis is not a real dispute. It is a worked example , constructed to show every primitive, every edge type, and at least one load-bearing contradiction.
CASE BRIEFING · FICTIONAL
Three parties, four weeks, one collapsed agreement. The Government of Taruna and the Keshara Liberation Front (KLF) signed a ceasefire in January, mediated by UNSOM with local Elder Council witnessing. Three weeks later the village of Mira was raided; each side blamed the other; the emergency session failed to reconcile contradictory accounts; by Feb 08 the ceasefire had formally collapsed.
Below is the same crisis as a TACITUS graph. Hover a node to see its edges. Click to pin. The primitives are color-coded; the timeline along the top is the temporal DAG underneath.
The faint dots and lines in the background are not decoration , they stand in for the thousands of token spans, provenance bindings, sub-events, and micro-claims the engine indexes underneath. Humans read the 22 labeled nodes. Machines have to hold all of it. TACITUS is the infrastructure that does.
EVENT TIMELINE · TEMPORAL DAG
Ceasefire signed in Nairobi by KLF, Gov. of Taruna, under UNSOM mediation
Village of Mira raided; KLF and Gov. make contradictory claims about initiator
Emergency guarantor session convened; mediators surface both claims with source provenance
Ceasefire collapses. Commitment cm1 (weapons withdrawal) formally violated
WHAT THE GRAPH SURFACES
CONTRADICTION
Gov. asserts KLF violated the ceasefire on Feb 03. KLF asserts Gov. entered the DMZ first the same day. Same event, same date, opposite attributions. The engine flags this as a load-bearing contradiction; any generation downstream is forced to cite both.
INTEREST-POSITION GAP
Surface positions read as an armed-group dispute. Primitive-separated, the underlying interest is regional autonomy , which opens resolution pathways that never appear at the position layer.
COMMITMENT DRIFT
Even as the ceasefire collapses, commitment cm2 (humanitarian corridor) remains active per the signed annex §4. A mediator without this structure would read the situation as total collapse.
TEMPORAL CHAIN
Edges trigger, escalate_to, and violates connect four events in five days. Not just correlation , each edge is typed, and each carries the source it was extracted from.
WHY THIS HELPS LLMS
STEP 1
Ask 'who violated what, and when?' , the graph returns typed nodes and edges with timestamps and source-document spans. No statistical guess; the answer is a database read.
STEP 2
Downstream language models receive ontology-shaped context , Actor X asserted Claim Y against Commitment Z , not a wall of prose. Fewer tokens wasted reconstructing structure the graph already knows.
STEP 3
Every extracted primitive carries provenance back to the source span. Any LLM output derived from the graph is natively citable , hallucination on keyed facts is architecturally harder.
STANDARD LLM FLOW
Input prose → attention over tokens → fluent answer without verifiable ground
OAG FLOW (TACITUS)
Input prose → extract → typed graph → deterministic query → fluent answer with source-bound citations
This is what the term neurosymbolic means in practice. The graph carries the structural weight; the language model stays in charge of the language. Each covers the other’s blind spot.
41+ classes · 29+ properties · Pydantic + OWL/Turtle · pip install tacitus-ontology
Explore the full ontology →ONTOLOGY PLAYGROUND · INTERACTIVE
Pick one of three canonical samples, click Structure it, and watch Dialectica tag every primitive , actors, claims, interests, commitments, constraints, leverage, events, narratives , with full provenance.
INPUT · dispute text
Public criticism on an internal channel, escalated to HR.
Alex publicly criticised Maya on an internal channel on May 12, asserting that Maya missed the Q2 deadline. Maya escalated to HR on May 14, filing a complaint that Alex violated the professionalism policy. Maya wants to keep her role and a written apology. Alex has said continued collaboration depends on a formal written apology. HR is bound by the grievance procedure §4.
8 PRIMITIVES
GRAPH STATS · typed output
Every node is bound to the source span it came from. Every edge is typed. Every claim is auditable back to the input.
THE PRODUCT SUITE
Every TACITUS product reads and writes the same typed conflict graph. Structure built in one surface is instantly available in all the others. Pick the surface that matches the work you actually do.
All products are under active development. Experimental. Send feedback.
WHERE TO GO NEXT