Publishing rules

Last updated 21 October 2026

These rules apply when you publish an ontology on ontology.live, which is run by Pivots Global LLC.

What publishing means

A published ontology gets its own public page. Anyone with the link can view it and download it as JSON, without signing in. Larger ontologies may also appear in search engines.
Only the version you publish is public. Edits you make afterwards stay private until you publish again.
You can unpublish at any time and the page goes offline straight away. Copies other people already made under the license can’t be recalled.
You appear under a handle you choose, anonymous by default. Your name and email address are never shown.

You keep ownership of what you publish. By publishing, you share it under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0): anyone may copy, adapt and reuse it, including commercially, as long as they credit the author and link to the license.
Only publish what you have the right to share. Ontologies based on open standards keep their original license, which is shown on their page.

Ontologies describe structure: concepts, properties and how they relate. We never store real people’s data in them, published or not.
Whenever an ontology is created, imported, built from your documents or saved, values that look like personal data, such as people’s names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, or ID, tax or account numbers, are replaced with made-up values of the same kind. The structure stays exactly the same.
Documents you upload are used only to build the ontology and are deleted once it is built.
Before anything is published it is checked once more, and anything that still looks like personal data blocks publishing.

New ontologies start as drafts that only you can see. The free plan keeps up to 3 drafts at a time.
Paid plans can keep any number of ontologies private.

Every public page has a “Report personal data or abuse” link. You can also email [email protected] with the page’s link and what is wrong.
If you ever spot something that looks like real personal data, report it and we will remove it.
We may unpublish or remove ontologies that break these rules.

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