Ontonomic

About

Ontonomic is a UK-based research and engineering consultancy. We work across two strands: natural language research, and the design and engineering of data-driven applications.

Research

Our research and consultancy work specialises in:

• Natural Language Analytics using Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Sentence-level semantic similarity methods for text and concept analysis.
• Network analysis.

Corpora studied include peace process documents (peace agreements, implementation reports, and mediation documents), national security documents, national constitutions, constitutional court decisions, and research ethics documentation.

Actor network analysis includes methods for detecting the generation and fragmentation of actor clusters over time, superimposition of actor networks from different spaces, hypergraphs, and novel visualisation methods.

Research programmes we contribute to:

• PeaceRep
• Comparative Constitutions Project
• Concept Integration Lab
• Mapping Security Threats in National Security Documents

Applications

Data-driven applications we are currently building:

• RIDA — an AI retrievability audit tool that measures how visible an academic journal is to AI retrieval and RAG pipelines, combining metadata, citation-graph and structured-markup signals into a composite index. Includes a web interface for running and reviewing audits.
• Graphtensor — a natural language query system for structured research corpora, compiling questions into operations across a knowledge graph and a tensor space.
• CCP Portal — a data portal for the Comparative Constitutions Project, built on a modern Python web stack to serve constitutional events, codings and country data.

People

Roy Gardner. Roy is Ontonomic's senior partner.

Sally Gardner. Sally is an ontology and knowledge engineer.

Callum Wilson. Callum is a mathematician and data scientist working with LLMs and tensors.

Matt Martin. Matt is a political scientist interested in computational methodologies and natural language processing.

Sample Publications

1. Neal, A., & Gardner, R. (2026). National Security and Defence Documents Dataset (1987–2025) v3.5 [Data set]. PeaceRep, University of Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/8101
2. Neal, A. W., Rogers, L., & Gardner, R. B. (2026). The Shifting Referents of Space Security. In Security and Space (pp. 179–194). Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529245714.ch011
3. Gardner, R., Martin, M., Moran, A., Elkins, Z., Cruz, A., & Pérez, G. (2026). Expanding Your Vocabulary: A Framework for Topic Integration in Texts. Social Science Computer Review. https://doi.org/10.1177/08944393261443513
4. Cruz, A., Elkins, Z., Gardner, R., Martin, M., & Moran, A. (2023). Measuring constitutional preferences: A new method for analyzing public consultation data. PLOS ONE, 18(12), e0295396. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295396
5. Gardner, R. (2023). Semantic Analysis to Support Peace Analytics. PeaceRep, University of Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.7488/era/5252
6. Neal, A., Wilson, L., & Gardner, R. (2022). National Security Strategies, Emergent Powers and ‘Sustaining Peace’. PeaceRep, University of Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.7488/era/5212
7. Gardner, R., & Bell, C. (2022). Global Realignments: Understanding Peace Process Interventions Through News. PeaceRep, University of Edinburgh. https://doi.org/10.7488/era/5213