Reference

Assessment Frameworks

The Global.Church knowledge graph treats assessment as a multi-tier activity. The same infrastructure that scores people groups (Joshua Project Progress Scale, IMB Assessment, Phases of Engagement) extends to scoring churches (Church Circle, IMB 12 Healthy Church Characteristics, Exponential Five Levels).

Methodology registry

gc:AssessmentMethodologyScheme is the single discovery point for every assessment methodology in the graph, regardless of what entity it targets:

Concept	Notation	Tier	Source framework
gc:MethodologyJPProgressScale	JPPS	People Group	Joshua Project
gc:MethodologyIMBAssessment	IMBA	People Group	IMB
gc:MethodologyPhasesOfEngagement	POE	People Group	Phases of Engagement Toolkit coalition
gc:MethodologyChurchCircle	CHCIR	Church (Ekklesia)	DMM/CPM movement vocabulary
gc:MethodologyIMB12Chars	IMB12	Church (Ekklesia)	IMB
gc:MethodologyExponentialFiveLevels	EXPFL	Church (Ekklesia)	Exponential

Discoverability is a single SPARQL query:

Code
 
PREFIX gc:   <https://ontology.global.church/core#>
PREFIX skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>

SELECT ?methodology ?label ?notation WHERE {
  ?methodology skos:inScheme gc:AssessmentMethodologyScheme ;
               skos:prefLabel ?label ;
               skos:notation ?notation .
} ORDER BY ?notation

The tier is recoverable from how the methodology is used (gc:assessesPeopleGroup, gc:assessesEkklesia). A generalized gc:assessmentTarget superproperty makes "any assessment, any tier" a single graph traversal.

Methodology registration vs. dimension schemes

The methodology registration concept — gc:MethodologyIMB12Chars, gc:MethodologyExponentialFiveLevels — is a Global.Church index entry. It carries dct:source pointing to the source framework and rdfs:seeAlso pointing to the dimension scheme.

The dimension and result-value schemes live in source-attributed namespaces:

• imb:TwelveCharacteristicsScheme (https://ontology.global.church/imb#) — IMB framework.
• exp:FiveLevelsScheme (https://ontology.global.church/exp#) — Exponential framework.

These URIs are minted under https://ontology.global.church/ sub-domains and source-attributed via dct:publisher and skos:editorialNote on each scheme file.

Where Global.Church is the legitimate curator — generic DMM/CPM vocabulary like Church Circle — the scheme stays in gc:. The test for which side a vocabulary lands on: if a single, named organization owns the framework, it belongs under their sub-namespace and is source-attributed; otherwise it lives in gc:.

Result-value conventions

Frameworks are not commensurable. IMB 12 Healthy Church Characteristics is qualitative — field teams describe each characteristic in their own words. Exponential Five Levels is a unitary growth-trajectory ladder rating the whole church. Church Circle records per-element present/absent/reproducing booleans. There is no shared maturity ladder; each framework uses the result-value shape its source publishes:

Methodology	Result-value carrier
Church Circle	gc:datumValue literal (present / emerging / reproducing / absent) on per-element gc:AssessmentDatum
IMB 12 Characteristics	gc:datumLiteralValue (free-form text) on per-characteristic gc:AssessmentDatum
Exponential Five Levels	Single gc:exponentialLevel link on the gc:AssessmentResult to an exp:Level* concept

If a dashboard needs cross-framework rollup, the rollup is per-methodology query code at that point — not a normalization layer in the ontology.

Lifecycle vs. Exponential — adjacent, not equivalent

Two distinct schemes describe a church's trajectory and share some textual vocabulary:

• gc:EkklesiaLifecycleScheme — descriptive six-stage life-arc: Forming → Established → Multiplying / Stalled / Reconstituting / Dissolved. Honors the full lifecycle including church death and rebirth.
• exp:FiveLevelsScheme — Exponential's normative five-step growth ladder: Subtracting → Plateauing → Adding → Reproducing → Multiplying. Apex is Multiplying.

Cross-references are asserted asymmetrically in the exp: vocab file:

Code
 
exp:LevelMultiplying skos:closeMatch  gc:LifecycleMultiplying .   # apex ↔ apex
exp:LevelReproducing skos:relatedMatch gc:LifecycleMultiplying .  # adjacent, not equivalent

gc:LifecycleMultiplying is stricter — it requires verifiable daughter ekklesia (gc:fulfillsCommitment or gc:wasSentFrom links). Exponential's Multiplying is "the multiplication of multipliers" — generationally reproducing rather than singly-reproducing. skos:closeMatch on the apex pair; skos:relatedMatch on the Reproducing pair flags that single-generation reproduction is conceptually neighboring but not equivalent.

Querying current health

The gc:hasCurrentHealthResult property links each Ekklesia to its latest non-superseded gc:AssessmentResult per (Ekklesia, methodology) pair, materialized by an inference rule that re-runs on every GraphDB load.

Code
 
PREFIX gc:   <https://ontology.global.church/core#>
PREFIX prov: <http://www.w3.org/ns/prov#>

SELECT ?ekklesia ?methodology ?level WHERE {
  ?ekklesia gc:hasCurrentHealthResult ?result .
  ?result   prov:wasGeneratedBy / gc:assessmentMethodology ?methodology ;
            gc:exponentialLevel ?level .
} ORDER BY ?ekklesia

See also

• Engagement Accelerators — the orthogonal classification of what an organization does at each engagement phase.
• Ekklesia Model — the four-axis classification of churches that assessment methodologies attach to.
• ontology.global.church — full class and property reference, including each methodology's source attribution.