Guide · The ontology
The ontology
The ontology is the lab's vocabulary for earnings: the kinds of thing a release can state, such as a reported value, guidance or a risk, and how they connect. Every node on the graph is typed by one of its classes, which is why a node's panel names its class.
What it is
An ontology is a shared, written-down vocabulary. This one says what an earnings release can
contain and how the pieces relate: a company reports values for metrics and periods, gives
guidance, names drivers and risks, announces corporate events and quotes its executives. Each
kind of thing is a class, and each class has a short name with the prefix ern:, such as
ern:ReportedValue.
The lab extracts facts from filings by asking a language model to fill in this vocabulary and nothing else, so a fact either fits a class or is not recorded.
The classes you meet most
| Class | What it records | Article |
|---|---|---|
ern:ReportedValue |
A number the company reported | Reported value |
ern:Guidance |
The company's own forecast | Guidance |
ern:Driver, ern:Risk |
Why a metric moved, and what could hold it back | Drivers and risks |
ern:CorporateEvent |
A buyback, dividend, acquisition and the like | Corporate events |
ern:Quote |
Words an executive said, verbatim | Management quotes |
ern:AnalystQuestion |
A question asked on an earnings call | Analyst questions |
ern:Passage |
The piece of a filing a fact came from | Passages |
ern:ExtractionRun |
The run that produced the facts | Extraction runs |
Words resolve to meaning
Companies say the same thing in different words: sales, net sales, top line. The ontology's metric concepts carry those wordings as synonyms and, where one exists, the matching XBRL concept the SEC uses for the figure. That is how a question about "sales" finds facts recorded as revenue.
On the page
A node's panel has a section called Class in the ontology. It names the class, gives its definition, and links to the Ontology tab, which lays out every class and how often the run used it.