Crisis of Overlapping Ontologies

The Crisis of Overlapping Ontologies was a period of administrative disorder, conventionally dated to 712 Tower Reckoning (TR), during which two or more catalogued objects, categories, or persons were found to occupy the same ontological position simultaneously and without prior arrangement. The Crisis is generally treated as the originating event of Conceptual Zoning and, in most recensions, as the incident that preceded the foundation of the Department of Subsidiary Ontologies some eleven years later. It is not recorded as having ended; the register lists it under "concluded, in the ordinary sense" with no closing entry.

Origin on Floor 4409

The disorder is first attested in the field notes of Journeyman Archivist Ollo Vane, who on 3 Fennuary 712 reported that a corridor on Floor 4409 had acquired two doors where the survey of 698 recorded one, and that both were the door to the same reading room.

Vane's superior, Sub-Librarian Marrow of the Ninth Spiral, treated the duplication as a clerical error and ordered the second door removed. The order could not be executed, as the removal of either door left the other in place and functionally unchanged; an attempt to remove both left the reading room accessible by a length of wall. The correspondence is preserved in Digest 2001-xi and runs to ninety-one folios, of which forty are Vane requesting clarification and fifty-one are Marrow declining to give it.

By the spring of the year the difficulty had spread to categories. A single shelf-mark was found to apply to two distinct collections, neither of which could be re-marked without the other's consent, and the consent forms, when filed, were found to be the same form. The Librarians convened an extraordinary session in the Aperture of Concordant Readings, the first such session since the ratification of the Third Concordance.

The Provisional Ruling of 713

The session produced the Provisional Ruling on Simultaneous Occupancy, which established that where two entities occupy the same ontological position, neither is to be removed; the position itself is to be divided. This was a departure from prior practice, which had held that the later arrival ceded its claim. The Ruling's second clause, concerning the allocation of divided positions to floors, was struck from the record on the eleventh day and has never been recovered, though Concordance 9-epsilon assumes it throughout.

"Where two things stand in one place, the place is at fault and shall be made two."

— Provisional Ruling on Simultaneous Occupancy, clause 1

The Ruling was applied unevenly. On Floor 4409 the doors were divided between two annexes of the same reading room, and Vane was appointed to neither. On Floor 3112 a bell and its echo were separated by zoning and have not rung together since.

Institution of Conceptual Zoning

The formal apparatus that emerged from the Crisis — setbacks, interstitial margins, and the prescribed distances between adjacent categories — is the subject of Conceptual Zoning, which cites the Crisis in its preamble as "the necessity from which we proceed." The Department of Subsidiary Ontologies was instituted in 723 TR with custody of the zones and of the registered Type 3 quanta arising from them.

The Committee for Non-Intersecting Jurisdictions disputes the sequence. Its Memorandum on Precedence of Zones argues that zoning antedates the Crisis by as much as forty years and that the Crisis was a failure of a system already in place rather than a cause of one. The Committee's position is not refuted in the Department's own histories, which simply do not mention it. See also the standing dispute recorded in the Commentary on Displaced Ontologies, whose third recension treats the year 712 as an insertion by a later hand.

Incidents arising

Several episodes are conventionally assigned to the Crisis, though their inclusion varies by recension. Chief among them is the near-duplication of the Deputy Registrar of the Fourth Annex, attested in 714, in which a single office was found to be held by two holders with a single signature between them — a matter eventually resolved under the Dual Signatures convention rather than by zoning. The Crisis of the Seventeen Syndics of a later period is sometimes described as a recurrence, a usage the Bureau of Recurrence has twice rejected.

A lesser incident, on Floor 7015, is treated separately under the Custodial Crisis of Floor 7015.

Historiography

The principal difficulty in the record is that the Crisis altered the means by which it would have been recorded. Two-thirds of the surviving documentation is preserved in duplicate, and the duplicates do not agree. The Commission for Onomastic Coherence has ruled that both copies are to be cited, but not in the same document.

Practical arrangements remain in force. Visitors are reminded that the annexes of the half-rooms created in 712 are not to be carried through one another, and the Tertiary Clerk on duty at the Aperture of Concordant Readings will not accept enquiries on the subject between the hours of noon and two, when the divided positions are counted.