PC
Professional Concepts
Professional identity — what kind of professional an actor is.
cross-ref: ISCO-08 · SOC-2018 · 698 concepts live
PC.100.010.010.010.020.010displays as “ACVS Diplomate (Surgery)”
// USAT1024 v1.1 — open taxonomy standard
USAT1024
v1.1 published 2026-04-21free with citationopen standardpublished by urSynergy Inc.
USAT1024 — the Universal Standard Articulated Taxonomy — is urSynergy’s open taxonomy for professional concepts, tenancy roles, professional functions, license categories, license scopes, verification claims, and jurisdictional authority. The standard is vertical-agnostic by architecture. Its first published instantiation covers animal-care professional concepts: veterinary practice, breeding, welfare services, municipal animal control, and adjacent professions. Future versions will extend the taxonomy into other domains where subject-centered records, stewardship scopes, and authority composition apply.
// downloads
// read this · cite this
Markdown · v1.1
The complete specification. Greppable, version-controllable.
// paginated archival copy
PDF · not yet cut
The Markdown above is the normative artifact. A paginated copy follows; nothing in the standard is withheld pending it.
// machine-readable taxonomy
per-family JSON · following ship
Until then all seven published families are readable over HTTP — /api/v1/usat1024/concepts/{code}, no key, no account.
// amendment in preparation
v1.2 — ratified 2026-06-27 — makes numeric segments canonical, reserves sentinel bands across every family, requires a per-family mode declaration, and promotes JC to numeric-canonical. It exists today as a ratified diff against v1.1, not as a consolidated document, so v1.1 remains the version to cite and implement.
// 01 seven canonical families
00
Seven families
Each family is versioned independently against the same specification document. Each family cross-references to established international taxonomies so implementers can map without losing meaning on transition.
The numeric code is the identity. The readable label beside it is a display slug — a presentation layer resolved through the term store. A conformant implementation stores, cites and resolves the numeric code; it never treats the label as identity, because labels are translated, deprecated and re-scoped while the code is stable forever.
Counts below are the live registry as of 2026-08-17. The registry carries eight further working families beyond the seven the specification names — among them species, breeds and anatomy — which are in production use but not yet in a published version of the standard. That gap is stated rather than smoothed over.
TR
Tenancy Roles
Relationship between an actor and an organization (platform authority).
cross-ref: — · 27 concepts live
TR.010.010displays as “Platform Admin”
PF
Professional Function
Functional role an actor performs at an organization (job function).
cross-ref: ISCO-08 · SOC-2018 · 58 concepts live
PF.100.010.010displays as “Chief Executive”
LC
License Categories
Categories of regulated professional licenses.
cross-ref: ISO 3166-2 (jurisdictional subdivisions) · 67 concepts live
LC.010.010displays as “Veterinary Physician License”
LS
Licensing scopes
Explicit scopes a license authorizes the holder to perform within its licensing context.
cross-ref: — · 47 concepts live
LS.010.010displays as “Diagnose and Treat Small Animals”
VC
Verification claims
Structured claims about an identity that verification authorities can attest to.
cross-ref: SNOMED CT (for clinical claim subsets) · 34 concepts live
VC.010.010displays as “Government ID Verified”
JC
Jurisdictions
Regulatory and legal jurisdictions with authority.
cross-ref: ISO 3166 · ISO 3166-2 · 35,261 concepts live
JC.001.280displays as “Missouri”
// 02 citation
00
Free to use, required to cite
Implementations of USAT1024 must attribute the standard at a visible surface appropriate to the implementation — documentation, specification, about-page, or equivalent. A minimal attribution is sufficient; commercial-grade attribution is not required.
// minimal attribution
Implements USAT1024 v1.1 — https://ursynergy.com/standards/usat1024
// bibliographic form
urSynergy Inc. (2026). USAT1024 v1.1: Universal Standard Articulated Taxonomy. https://ursynergy.com/standards/usat1024
// 03 first-class agents + bounded delegation
00
AI agents as first-class users
USAT1024 recognizes AI agents alongside human users via the user_type='ai_agent' designation. Agents carry their own credentials, their own verification status, and their own audit trail — not as second-class proxies for their human principals, but as first-class actors with bounded delegation scopes.
Bounded delegation is the universal authorization principle: authorization is the intersection of the instructing authority (what the principal grants) and the executing permission (what the agent itself is allowed to do). Every action is subject to two-gate checks and universal audit. An agent cannot exceed the principal's delegation. A principal cannot instruct an agent to do what the agent is structurally forbidden from doing.
The three-layer identity model that underpins this — user plus professional concept plus organization — is the substrate. Authorization is composed, not granted. The composition is auditable. Every link in the chain is separately verifiable.
// 04 the registry, running
00
A standard nobody runs is a document
USAT1024 is implemented against an isolated registry, not embedded in a product database. Concepts are minted through one resolver that searches before it mints — against the accepted name and every recorded synonym — so the same thing cannot quietly acquire two identities. Every mint requires an external authority and writes an append-only resolution event. Where no authority carries a concept the platform genuinely needs, it is minted as curated and graded strictly below authority-operated, so the record states plainly that a person asserted it.
Resolution runs both directions. Asked inward for a term, the resolver answers with a single concept or reports ambiguity — it does not pick. Asked for knee with a dog in context it returns the stifle joint; with a horse, the carpal region; with no species in context it returns both candidates and refuses to choose. That refusal is the feature.
A parity oracle re-derives the registry from its source files daily and fails loudly on any divergence. It has caught real drift.
Four answers, and one of them is “we don’t know”
The knowledge walk — GET /api/v1/usat1024/knowledge — takes a concept and climbs the hierarchy looking for the nearest cited claim, composing the registry, the measurement engine and the geo engine as it goes. It can return exactly four things, and the constraint that shapes all four is that it may never invent the answer it did not find.
SINGLE
One cited claim, or several that agree. The ordinary case.
OUTWEIGHED_BUT_PRESERVED
A stronger authority wins — and the claims it outranked are still carried in the response. Losing an argument is not the same as being deleted from it.
STANDING_DISAGREEMENT
Two authorities of equal standing say different things. Every conflicting claim is returned. The system is built so that it cannot silently pick a winner.
UNKNOWN
No cited claim at the concept or any ancestor. It reaches the surface intact rather than being filled with a plausible constant.
Most record systems resolve a conflict by ranking sources and returning the winner, which reads as authority and hides that a disagreement ever existed. A veterinarian reading a single confident number has no way to know two references disagreed. Here the disagreement is the answer, and so is the gap.
Not gated, not licensed commercially
USAT1024 is not gated behind a fee. There is no license agreement separate from the attribution constraint. There is no permission-to-implement commercial term, and urSynergy sells no compliance verification for it — for this standard or for AWDPS, which urSynergy also publishes and holds itself to.
// /standards/usat1024// page version v1.2.0// last-updated 2026-08-15// figures measured 2026-08-17// standards USAT1024 v1.1