SHAMIL™: A Structured Notation Standard for Knowledge Graph Entity Representation
Open Standard
Younis Group
Search Sciences™ Research Programme
Published under the leadership of
Mohammed Younis, Chief Scientist
Version 1.0
March 2026
Publication Note
SHAMIL™ is published as a working paper within the Search Sciences™ Research Programme, operated by Younis Group under the governance of Mohammed Younis, Chief Scientist. It is maintained as an open standard by the SHAMIL Foundation, an independent standards body. The SHAMIL™ trademark is owned by Younis Group Ltd and licensed to the SHAMIL Foundation for stewardship of the standard.
This publication page constitutes the Younis Group record of the standard within the Search Sciences™ Research Programme. The canonical specification, context file, and conformance documentation are hosted at shamil.foundation. The permanent citable Version 1.0 record is available through Zenodo.
Abstract
The contemporary digital information environment presents a structural failure at the knowledge layer. Entities — organisations, persons, products, concepts, places — exist across search engines, large language models, and knowledge graph systems in a condition of semantic inconsistency, unverified attribution, and unstructured representation. AI systems cannot distinguish authoritative entity descriptions from optimised imitations because no formal mechanism exists for encoding entity knowledge in a form that is simultaneously human-authorable, machine-convertible, and governance-ready.
SHAMIL™ — Subject, Hierarchy, Attribute, Method, Interaction, Link — is a structured notation standard that addresses this failure at its foundation. It provides a human-readable, mnemonic grammar for encoding entity nodes in knowledge graphs, with deterministic conversion pathways to JSON-LD 1.1, RDF triple notation, and SHACL validation shapes. Every entity created using the SHAMIL™ notation is expressed as a JSON-LD file placed in the head of a webpage and immediately readable by systems capable of processing JSON-LD structured data — without dependency on any external authority framework or vocabulary extension.
The standard is vocabulary-agnostic. It does not depend on Schema.org. Vocabulary integration — Schema.org, sector ontologies, domain-specific extensions — is provided through a plugin architecture. The core standard provides the grammar. Extensions provide the vocabulary. Neither requires the other to function.
Intellectual Foundations
The intellectual lineage of SHAMIL™ traces directly to the Islamic Golden Age tradition of information science. These foundations are structural, not decorative. They are the governing intellectual premise from which the standard is derived.
The name SHAMIL™ derives from the Arabic شامل — meaning comprehensive, universal, all-encompassing, and complete. It is not an acronym. It is a name chosen to carry both the scope of the framework and the intellectual tradition from which it emerges.
Al-Farabi (872–950 CE) developed the systematic classification of the sciences, establishing that knowledge must be organised hierarchically to avoid ambiguity and to enable reliable inference across domains. The six dimensions of SHAMIL™ are the structural implementation of this principle: Subject and Hierarchy operationalise his ontological placement requirement; Attribute operationalises his domain-scoped property governance; Method operationalises his requirement that capabilities be defined within domains; Interaction operationalises his relational discipline; Link operationalises his requirement for traceable external corroboration. SHAMIL™ is Al-Farabi’s Enumeration of the Sciences expressed as a structured entity schema.
Imam Al-Bukhari (810–870 CE) formalised the principle that a claim is only as trustworthy as the integrity of its chain of attribution. His isnad methodology governs the L component of SHAMIL™ and the standard’s relationship to the Verified Source Protocol — every node carries its chain of attribution in L, available for verification when authority is sought.
Al-Khwarizmi (780–850 CE) established systematic methods for resolving unknowns through defined procedures. His methodological principle governs the M component: entity capabilities are declared as structured, named procedures rather than inferred behaviours.
Ibn al-Haytham (965–1040 CE) formalised the scientific method through repeatability, falsifiability, and evidence-based validation. His conditions govern the A component and the conformance framework: SHAMIL™ nodes are designed to be repeatable, falsifiable, and evidence-based.
Relationship to the Verified Source Protocol
SHAMIL™ and the Verified Source Protocol are complementary but distinct. VSP governs admissibility — it determines whether a representation is authorised to enter a system as authoritative. SHAMIL™ governs structure — it determines how that representation is organised, classified, and related to other entities within the knowledge environment.
The two are interoperable but not interdependent. VSP defines constraints on authority and provenance without prescribing semantic structure. SHAMIL™ defines structured semantic representation without determining verification mechanisms. A SHAMIL™ node without L declarations carries no external provenance chain and cannot be VSP-verified. A SHAMIL™ node with a decentralised identifier in its L component is fully VSP-compatible.
Their integration establishes the foundational layer for verified and semantically governed AI-compatible knowledge systems. That integration is described in full in White Paper No. 4 — A Federated Architecture for Verified and Governed Knowledge Systems.
Stewardship and Licensing
SHAMIL™ is maintained as an open standard by the SHAMIL Foundation. The Foundation does not certify implementations, operate commercial registries, or endorse vendors. The SHAMIL™ trademark is owned by Younis Group Ltd and licensed to the SHAMIL Foundation for stewardship of the standard.
The specification is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Attribution must be given to the SHAMIL Foundation and Younis Group as originators of the standard.
Suggested citation: Younis, M. (2026) SHAMIL™: A Structured Notation Standard for Knowledge Graph Entity Representation. Version 1.0. Search Sciences™ Research Programme. Younis Group Ltd. shamil.foundation/specifications/shamil/1.0
Access
Full specification — shamil.foundation
Permanent citable record — [DOI]