ADR-A99: Reference vocabularies and peril structure

Status: Accepted Date: 2026-09-26 (proposed), 2026-09-26 (accepted) Related: ADR-A85 (scoped binding resolution), ADR-A87 (concept exclusion), ADR-A98, ADR-A100 Unit: applied-insurance-reference (AIR-0.1) Sketches: peril-vocabulary.md, peril-structure-whitepaper.md

Context

What a peril means in a contract is fixed by the contract’s drafter (a carrier, an MGA, a broker) or by its market, which may publish its own list. Consumers bring those lists, most of them flat or limited to a few levels. Lattice’s applied insurance domain still needs a reference peril vocabulary: a default where no other vocabulary is bound/available, to provide a target for crosswalks and the structure that contract checks need. The whitepaper shows that a SKOS hierarchy alone cannot carry that structure: kinds and parts differ, triggering is directed, some perils overlap without subsumption, cyber and flood wordings select by mechanism and agency, bundles are sets, and some perils are defined by thresholds.

Vocabulary resolves scoped bindings by one rule (ADR-A85): among applicable bindings, one whose scopes are a strict superset of another’s wins, and any remaining tie is a governance conflict. Bindings at agreement, organisation and market level therefore need a declared scope pattern, or they tie.

Decision

  1. A reference edition is the unscoped fallback. LATTICE publishes reference editions, marked as such by skos:editorialNote on each scheme, and binds each as voc:boundScheme on its contract in insurance/common/. A reference edition is never presented as a market standard. Any other edition, flat or structured, may be bound instead, and need not extend the reference.

  2. Scopes nest. Bindings above the fallback name nested scopes, so that ADR-A85’s rule orders them without further logic:

    Binding Names the scopes
    market (a market-published edition, for example) market, and a legal regime where the edition is regime-specific
    drafting organisation the market scopes, and the organisation
    agreement the organisation binding’s scopes, and the agreement

    A binding outside this pattern that ties with another is reported as a conflict, as Vocabulary already specifies.

  3. The peril vocabulary names causes only. Consequences, harm subjects, lines of business and liability direction (ADR-A102) are other schemes.

  4. Structure beyond SKOS is expressed as sub-properties and separate schemes, so a consumer reading only SKOS sees ordinary broader, related and semantic relations:

    Structure Expression
    kind and part prl:broaderGeneric, prl:broaderPartitive ⊑ skos:broader, aligned to the thesaurus standard’s iso-thes:broaderGeneric and iso-thes:broaderPartitive. skos:broader is materialised
    triggering prl:canTrigger ⊑ skos:semanticRelation, irreflexive, neither symmetric nor transitive. SKOS has no directed associative relation, and skos:related is symmetric
    overlap prl:overlaps ⊑ skos:related, declared symmetric and irreflexive itself
    integrity neither prl:canTrigger nor prl:overlaps links two concepts in one skos:broaderTransitive chain, checked by shape
    characteristics one scheme per axis (mechanism, agency, onset, definition basis, accumulation class), linked from cause concepts for typical values and from occurrences for facts. The name is “characteristic”. “Facet” is not used
    collections skos:Collection sub-classes for bundles, standard sets and model groupings, expanded at bind time
    thresholds and windows links to Quantification: intensity measure, defining threshold as a qnt:RangeSet, customary event window
  5. Crosswalks from other lists are reviewed MORK artefacts under ADR-A100, never edits to the reference.

Consequences