On a Plurality of Ontologies: Reparative justice in broken systems

We argue that data specialists must pivot from analysts to facilitators: arrowkeepers responsible for the semantic integrity of FAIR data systems that democratise analysis.In Category Theory for the Sciences, David Spivak issues a foundational warning about ontological diagrams of systems:"The author of an olog has a worldview\ldots{} When person A examines the olog of person B, person A may or may not agree with it." This paper centres that warning---and asks why so few systems heed it. In computation, diagrams are often treated as ontologically neutral. Yet every system of objects and arrows encodes a perspective---and when one perspective dominates, others are erased. Critical theory offers tools, such as decolonisation, for recognising these erasures and examining who defines the ontology.We do not propose a comprehensive ethical framework. Instead, we introduce a small, validatable arrow-based schema, drawn from categorical thinking, to expose systemic erasure and recommend reparative action. This schema is applied in two domains: sustainable development strategy, where the traditional knowledge of local communities is erased by top-down conservation models; and FAIR data workflows, where applied scientists are marginalised by assumptions of reproducibility. In both, our schema surfaces the arrows omitted by conventional system diagrams---and with them, the people those arrows represent. This is not a general theory, but a focused demonstration: a single application of arrow analysis to show how structural erasure can be made visible---and mitigated---through an intersection of critical and categorical frameworks.Let the people define the arrows---only then will the stories that were erased be heard.