Epistemic Antibodies: A Technical Implementation of Semantic Immunity for Conceptual Lineage Protection

The open scientific record faces a paradox. The same digital infrastructures that promised to democratize knowledge have also enabled new forms of systematic intellectual appropriation. An original conceptual framework, once published in open text, can be harvested, terminologically rebranded, and relaunched as a novel contribution by actors within the networks of power and influence that control a given field of knowledge. The original author is then rendered invisible not through explicit rejection, but through a combination of epistemic erasure (the omission of the original source) and epistemic dilution (the accumulation of derivative publications that bury it). Existing defensive measures, such as cryptographic timestamping or persistent identifiers, establish temporal priority. They do not, however, bind the derivative framework to its origin in a way that travels with the data through the semantic web. A timestamp proves that something existed earlier. It does not automatically expose a later plagiarism as plagiarism. This article introduces a new defensive layer: Epistemic Antibodies. These are active semantic structures—instantiated as RDF/JSON-LD graphs—that bind to derivative frameworks and expose their true lineage. They do not establish the relation of derivation; they encode, identify, and persist a determination that has already been produced by an epistemic procedure. The system is grounded in an immunological metaphor and organized around three distinct epistemic functions. The CLEO Protocol performs recognition: it evaluates a candidate framework against the constitutive conceptual signatures of an original sovereign framework and determines whether the candidate is structurally derivative. The CLEO Determination performs registration: it records the result of that evaluation, with its date, protocol, and supporting documentation. The Epistemic Antibody performs semantic persistence and exposure: it binds to the derivative framework and makes the determination machine-readable and recoverable across changing information environments. The system is formalized in the epimsys ontology (version 3.0), which integrates the W3C PROV-O vocabulary to provide a formal provenance layer for the determination process. This paper presents the technical architecture of epistemic antibodies, their formal implementation, and a first deployment case against a real-world derivative framework: the “Platonic Space” framework introduced by Michael Levin.