JUDGMENT ONTOLOGY
A decade of tradecraft, formalized.
The operational layer that makes Sayari’s AI trustworthy. Built from eleven years of real-world tradecraft – encoding skills, failure modes, and judgment criteria into every AI decision.
ontology.evaluate
{
“skill”: “source_verification”,
“input”: “No sanctions matches found”,
“traps_detected”: [
“confidence_inflation”,
“source_gap”
],
“judgment”: “FAIL”,
“rationale”: “High confidence on thin evidence.
No ownership traversal performed.”,
“remediation”: “traverse_ownership_chain”
}
Our world model gave us intelligence. Our tradecraft is what we built to make sense of it.
The Judgment Ontology encodes tradecraft into Sayari’s AI – not as abstract rules, but as patterns drawn from thousands of real investigations and real outcomes.
Tradecraft produced judgment: knowing what to do next when the answer isn’t obvious.
300+
Hours of recorded expert investigations
66K+
Analyst judgments labeled and encoded
1K+
Written reports and findings
11
Years of real-world commercial intelligence
The Evaluation System
What Sayari’s agents learn from, and what their performance is measured against – encoding tradecraft as skills, failure modes, and judgment criteria.
PRINCIPLE 01
Reasoning matters
An AI that reaches the right answer through faulty reasoning will fail at scale – and you won’t be able to tell the difference.
PRINCIPLE 02
The Ontology constrains AI to reason like experienced analysts.
A million queries, same quality – because the judgment is sound, not lucky.
judgment_evaluation
skills: [source_verification, ownership_traversal,
jurisdiction_analysis, temporal_reasoning,
network_analysis, confidence_calibration,
lateral_creativity]
trap_patterns: 13 codified failure modes
labeled_decisions: 67,000+
scoring: GREEN / AMBER / RED
output: verdict + rationale + sources + next_steps
See the Difference
Generic AI
query: “Assess Meridian Trading LLC”
response: “Meridian Trading LLC is registered
in Delaware. No sanctions matches found.
The company appears to be a standard
trading entity with no significant
risk indicators.”
confidence: 0.91
reasoning: none
sources_checked: 1
traps_caught: 0
Sayari’s Agents (Ontology-Guided)
query: “Assess Meridian Trading LLC”
ontology.evaluate: {
skills_applied: [
“source_verification”,
“ownership_traversal”,
“jurisdiction_analysis”
],
traps_caught: [
“confidence_inflation”, // 0.91 on 1 source
“jurisdiction_blindness”, // DE ≠ operations
“ownership_opacity” // 3-layer BVI chain
],
reasoning: “visible”,
uncertainty: “calibrated”,
verdict: “ESCALATE”
}
Not a benchmark. A judgment system.
Not a leaderboard. A judgment system.
Most AI evaluation measures accuracy on generic tasks. The Judgment Ontology measures whether AI reasons the way an experienced analyst actually reasons.
Not a leaderboard metric. A quality system for decisions that have consequences – and it improves continuously.
Whether it checks sources or assumes them. Whether it flags what it doesn’t know or fills the gap with confidence.
Whether it catches the structure a sanctions evader built to be missed.
See the ontology in your domain.
Bring your evaluation criteria. We’ll show you how the Judgment Ontology adapts – and what your current AI stack is missing.