FOI-O: A global ontology and verification framework for Freedom of Information process modelling

Abstract

Public official-information request records contain process signals. They can support research, workflow review, and analyst-led assessment. 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. It is a global model that began with the New Zealand Official Information Act and has since iterated through the Australian Commonwealth and New South Wales settings. The NZ package remains the mature reference implementation; the Australian work remains provisional pending empirical evaluation and jurisdiction-specific legal validation. FOI-O models request records, observed correspondence, controlled vocabularies, provenance, review queues, release metadata, and bounded analysis rules. Legally meaningful outcomes require certification by an authorised decision-maker. Its typed operational and semantic contracts are supported by deterministic examples, process models, fixture-only process-mining exports, quality gates, and tests. This article describes the motivation, architecture, ontology-development method, its versioned extraction and review protocol, how related repositories share data and evidence, and how the method may be adapted for Australia, 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.