Subject-Event Ontology Without Global Time: Executable Semantics for Distributed Reality

Most information systems quietly assume a global timeline: events are ordered by timestamps, and “what happened” is derived from a shared notion of time. This paper challenges that assumption and proposes a Subject-Event Ontology (SEO) without global time, where order is defined by explicit causal dependencies - happens-before - rather than clocks.

Alexander Boldachev formalizes the approach around a simple but radical idea: an event is an act of fixation - a subject discerns and records a change using the conceptual models available to them. Instead of relying on timestamps for sequence and consistency, the ontology builds history through causal links, ensuring that execution remains deterministic even in distributed environments where clocks drift or global synchronization is impractical.

A key contribution is making the ontology executable: semantic models don’t just describe the world, they drive computation through a declarative, dataflow-like execution mechanism. The paper introduces axioms and invariants (e.g., monotonic history, acyclic causality, traceability) that ensure correctness of such executable ontologies, and discusses validation through models/schemas plus actor authorization - without introducing a global time axis.

Why it matters: this framework is well-suited for distributed systems, multi-agent environments, and multiperspective domains where different subjects may record conflicting facts - while still preserving a coherent, auditable causal structure.

Full paper on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18040