# Papers

donto's **own original research** — novel concepts and results that come out of building a bitemporal, paraconsistent, evidence-anchored knowledge substrate. Not literature surveys (those are [reports](/reports)); these are the contributions only a contradiction-preserving substrate can make. Living drafts, written from the live system and revised as the work progresses. Each was drafted then adversarially fact-checked against the running `donto-pg`, with claims held to a four-tier candor scale (proven / measured-but-noisy / conjectured / speculative).

_Last updated: 2026-06-13._

## Program

The [research agenda](/papers/research-agenda) lays out ten original problems that become *askable* once a knowledge base holds contradiction instead of collapsing it. They share one engine — **hold everything, align late, re-rank by reality** — and the papers below are the worked-out contributions.

| paper | contributes |
|---|---|
| **[The donto research agenda](/papers/research-agenda)** | The full program: the ten problems, why donto is uniquely positioned for each, the experiment that would establish it, and how they compound into one engine |

## Theory

| paper | contributes |
|---|---|
| **[The Bitemporal Sheaf](/papers/bitemporal-sheaf)** | Cellular-sheaf cohomology over *both* valid-time and transaction-time — combining bitemporal databases and sheaf theory for the first time. `H¹(valid,tx)` distinguishes *the world was contested* from *we were wrong then corrected*; "re-rank by reality" becomes a spectral flow that drains transaction-`H¹` while preserving genuine historical disagreement |
| **[Cycle contradictions](/papers/cycle-contradictions)** | The conflicts pairwise `donto_argument` edges structurally cannot see: loops of individually-fine claims that can't be globally reconciled (the Kitty *daughter-of* vs *spouse-of* case). Sheaf holonomy detects + localizes them — with the `d≥2` sign-carrying-maps correctness fact |
| **[Identity as a restriction map](/papers/identity-restriction-map)** | Non-destructive entity resolution: never merge — identity is a learned restriction map + a glue/no-glue verdict, a reversible query-time decision. On contested data this dominates merge-based ER, which a wrong early merge ruins irreversibly |
| **[Standing as a dynamical system](/papers/standing-dynamics)** | Epistemic standing ⟨maturity, corroboration, contradiction-pressure, recency⟩ as a vector field steered by a feedback loop with reality (the STEER loop). Fixed points = settled facts, limit cycles = perennial disputes; standing-weighting may be the *necessary* condition that makes the bitemporal-sheaf convergence hold |
| **[Alignment debt](/papers/alignment-debt)** | An information-economics of emit-free knowledge: when generation cost → 0, normalize-at-write becomes strictly worse than align-at-read. Defines *alignment debt* and the crossover `Δ_norm > r·δ·φ`; grounded in donto's 1.16M live predicates + the query-time fold engine (+8.7% recall, measured) |

## Empirical & method

| paper | contributes |
|---|---|
| **[Answer-Shaping](/papers/answer-shaping)** | The scalpel/hammer law from LoCoMo + LongMemEval on a weak reader: pre-computing the answer-relevant fact *lifts* focused-fact questions (preference 0.70→0.767) and *degrades* synthesis (0.70→0.63); aggregates-as-context = 86% of episodic accuracy at 3.8× fewer tokens |
| **[Decoupled anchoring](/papers/decoupled-anchoring)** | Separating *what* (extraction) from *where* (citation) into two always-on stages: run the cheapest extractor without losing faithfulness, and the citer becomes a hallucination filter. Anchor-precision over coverage — bogus spans driven to zero by construction (refuse, never fabricate) |
| **[Contested retrieval](/papers/contested-retrieval)** | Retrieval over a paraconsistent store that returns disagreement as a first-class result — "X (contested: 2 sources disagree, see Y)" — with a contestedness score from the sheaf `H¹`, instead of silently picking a winner |
| **[Generative-abundance metrics](/papers/abundance-metrics)** | Predicate proliferation as *signal*, not noise: a metric suite (proliferation, fold-rate, alignment-debt repayment) treating the freely-minted predicate space as the health signature of an emit-free KB; aggressive ingest-time typing destroys recoverable signal that query-time folding preserves |
| **[The verifiable epistemic trail](/papers/verifiable-trail)** | Agent memory as a bitemporal, evidence-anchored *claim trail* that is independently verifiable and replayable — reframing the agent-memory benchmark from accuracy to **accountability** ("what did the agent know, and when," as a query) |

_See also: [reports](/reports) (literature grounding + benchmark studies) · [benchmarks](/benchmarks) · [open questions](/questions)._