The Locus Model

Systems Economics Lexicon · Foundations of the Locus Language

Every economic classification system in general use — NAICS, SIC, ISIC, NACE, GICS, ICB, TRBC, RBICS — answers the same question: what industry is this business in? They differ in granularity, governance, and commercial model. They do not differ in the question they’re answering.

None of them answers the different question: what does this business functionally do, and where does that fall in the order of work?

What the Locus Model is

The Locus Model is a framework that establishes a coordinate-based functional language for living systems: a fixed lexicon and a syntax for combining its terms. Applied to the economy, its semantics link every coordinate to a real activity or resource. Positions are derived by rule from an activity’s own facts, not assigned by judgment. That’s the mechanical difference from an industry taxonomy: industry is a category label assigned top-down, by committee; a functional coordinate is computed bottom-up, from what an entity actually does.

Space has latitude and longitude. Time has date and hour. Economic activity, until this framework, had no equivalent third frame. The Locus Model supplies it — see Natural Functional Order for the invariant sequence that keeps the coordinate stable across geography, culture, technology, and era.

Why it clears every check

This is the one term across the entire vocabulary built on this textbook and lexicon that has cleared every qualification check run against it: absent from every incumbent taxonomy, clean prior art as a named framework, in continuous use since 2013, backed by granted US patents naming Rory Riggs as inventor. Every other term on this site carries some open question — a scoping requirement, an unrun check, a pending confirmation. This one doesn’t.

That clean status is also why an earlier version of this vocabulary’s governing frame got walked back. The original candidate for the top of the hierarchy was Functional Coordinates, not the Locus Model. That turned out to be the wrong call, for a specific, checkable reason: the pattern Functional + [noun] systematically fails, because “functional” doesn’t add enough rarity to overcome whatever the noun already means to someone else. Four related terms in that same family were already occupied — Functional Location is a standard SAP master-data object; Functional Coordinate System is established orthopaedic terminology; Functional Space is foundational mathematics. The Locus Model was the term that survived that same scrutiny.

The Locus Model is published as the governing frame — settled, not deferred, and no category term sits above it. The Locus Model, as a framework name, has a real advantage: a competitor never has to say it to be compared against it — a category term pulls retrieval in a way a product name can’t. A commissioned category term could theoretically have delivered more category reach, at the cost of months rather than weeks and no existing patent link. Publishing now doesn’t foreclose that path later — a category frame could still be added above the Locus Model in the future as an amendment, not a rebuild — but for now, the Locus Model stands as the frame.

See also: The Coordinate Family & the Patent Portfolio · What We Don’t Claim: A Vocabulary Sovereignty Case Study

Part of Foundations of the Locus Language, the first course in the Locus Theory series. For the full term-by-term specification, see the Lexicon.