econ.GNJul 3, 2026

FOI-O: An NZ-first ontology and verification methods package for Freedom of Information process modelling

Authors: Dylan A Mordaunt

Organizations: Faculty of Health, Education and Psychology, Victoria University of Wellington. · College of Medicine and Public Health, Flinders University. · Centre for Health Policy, The University of Melbourne.

Abstract

Public official-information request records contain process signals. They can support research, workflow review, and human-supervised agent help. Yet they also mix observed correspondence, platform states, inferred events, and legal outcomes. FOI-O is a reusable process-modelling method and verification infrastructure for Freedom of Information administration. FOI-O NZ, based on the New Zealand Official Information Act, is the only implemented and validated jurisdictional profile in the current repository. Broader reuse is a design intent and future validation path, not an empirical result of this package. FOI-O models the request record first. Request profiles, observed correspondence events, controlled vocabularies, and provenance make visible what was seen and how it was changed. It then adds review queues, release metadata, bounded agent contracts, semantic assets, process-model artefacts, and fixture-only process-mining interchange examples. Human certification of legally meaningful outcomes stays outside autonomous tooling. The repository provides JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Schema contracts, Python data models, Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) vocabularies, Web Ontology Language (OWL), Resource Description Framework (RDF), and Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL) assets. These are supported by deterministic examples, release metadata, quality gates, tests, Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and Petri Net Markup Language (PNML) process models, XES and OCEL-style fixture exports, and a planned New Zealand annotation task-set manifest. This article describes the motivation, architecture, ontology-development method, validation evidence, and implementation boundaries. The project is not legal advice, is not an official government publication, and does not certify release, refusal, redaction, charging, extension, transfer, complaint, or publication outcomes.

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