About

Overview

OHTL is building an open knowledge graph that describes and connects taxonomies of online harm.

It collects published taxonomies from regulators, researchers and industry, maps each one to an open schema, records crosswalks between their categories, and gives each source edition a permanent, archived address: an official archive, an open repository where the publisher's terms allow, or a Wayback Machine capture. The knowledge graph will be published as linked data using W3C standards. I hope it will help others build tools and services that support online safety.

Who could use it

  • Researchers comparing how regimes and studies define harms, and citing the exact edition of a taxonomy they used.
  • Policymakers and regulators seeing where other regimes draw their lines, and where their own categories match, overlap or differ.
  • Trust and safety teams and safety vendors aligning moderation categories and classifier labels with several regulatory regimes at once.
  • Software vendors building compliance, moderation and risk assessment products on open, citable data, rather than each keeping their own copy of the rules.
  • Businesses building agentic compliance tools giving AI agents a checked knowledge graph to work from, so their answers can be traced back to the source. See the FAQ.
  • Other organisations using the data for their own purposes, such as comparing their own policies or services with published guidance, training staff or informing their own research.

Open data helps smaller organisations too, which may not have the resources to map every regime themselves.

OHTL is a reference resource. The original documents are always the authority, and nothing on OHTL is legal advice.

Who runs OHTL

At the moment, OHTL is run only by me, David Sant. I am a technology lawyer and former software developer, based in Oxford, UK (this is me). I advise on technology, AI, data protection and regulatory compliance, including online safety legislation and codes of practice. I created OHTL as an independent initiative, and (for now) I look after it, but I am looking for others to help.

Independence

OHTL has no affiliation with any organisation, and no organisation endorses it - not my employer, and not the publishers or users of the sources. If that changes, it could create conflicts of interest, so I have listed it as one of the first governance issues to resolve.

Why do you use "we"?

This project is too big for one person. As the Roadmap says, it depends on people and organisations who will help build useful outputs and look after them over time. OHTL needs to become a "we" project, so that's what I'm working towards, and that's why this site mostly uses "we". If you'd like to help, see Work with OHTL or email contact@ohtl.org.