Catholic Semantic Canon
IncubatingA formal ontology designed to model the hierarchical and relational structure of the Catholic Deposit of Faith. It maps the interdependence of Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, and the Magisterium, providing a semantic framework for how these sources are transmitted and interpreted. The Catholic Semantic Canon moves beyond a static bibliography. It provides a machine-readable logic for the “Living Tradition”, capturing not just what the sources are, but how they relate to one another in terms of authority, chronology, and theological weight.
Project Leads
Diglio Simoni
Distinguished Technologist & HPC Scientist
Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Wipro — one of 16 in a company of 200,000 — and NASA Outstanding Achievement Award recipient. He began his career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory processing SAR imagery from the Magellan mission to Venus, and later served as Senior HPC Scientist at RTI International. He has led AI and knowledge graph initiatives for Apple, T-Mobile, and SABIC, and holds a US patent for semantic test suite reduction. His expertise spans AI, high-performance computing, and computational modeling.
Damien Riehl
Lawyer, Technologist & Musician
Lawyer, technologist, and musician who has been coding since 1985 and practicing law since 2002. At Clio, Damien uses AI to extract and generate insights from over one billion legal documents, worldwide. At SALI and later FOLIO, Damien has built and expanded an ontology of over 18,000 legal tags — effectively standardizing legal data. He also co-founded the All the Music project, computationally composing over 471 billion melodies released under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). During COVID, Damien founded Schola Diffusa, a virtual choir with singers across six continents.
Fr. John R. D’Orazio
Vice Chair and Lead Developer
Catholic priest incardinated in the Diocese of Rome, stationed in the Diocesan Pilgrimage Office. Fr. John is passionate about harnessing technology in service of the Church’s evangelizing mission, in a community-driven and synodal fashion. He has contributed to various open source projects, is the author of a Liturgical Calendar API and a Bible API, and has helped foster the growth of Open Source Catholic, a growing community of Catholic developers dedicated to building open source technology for the Church.