Vancam Core Ontology (VCO): An Agent-First Ontology for Real-Time Visual Status Claims

The Vancam Core Ontology (VCO) is a lightweight, agent-first ontology for representing real-time, visual, evidence-backed status claims about physical locations. VCO is designed to support AI agents and autonomous systems that must answer time-sensitive questions such as “Is this location clear, blocked, or unknown right now?” without hallucination. It provides a minimal semantic contract for expressing: • status claims (clear, blocked, limited, unknown)• supporting visual evidence (e.g., images with timestamps)• explicit temporal validity and freshness• scalar confidence and uncertainty The ontology intentionally models what is asserted, not how assertions are computed. Prediction, planning, routing, optimization, and confidence calculation algorithms are explicitly out of scope. VCO is intended to function as perception-layer infrastructure for agent ecosystems. It is suitable for use in APIs, Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools, autonomous agent pipelines, and real-time decision systems that require grounded visual evidence of current world state. The ontology is designed to be compatible with existing mobility and sensing standards (e.g., Transmodel, GTFS, SOSA/SSN) through optional alignment layers, while remaining independent and stable at its core. More information about Vancam AI and related tools is available at https://vancam.ai.