The institutes study their subjects.
This one studies their proportions.

618 is the parent institute of the federation: the register of its members, the charter they hold in common, and the treaty office for the borders between them.

It owns no collection. Its material is the relations — which institute holds which ground, where two of them meet, and what each has agreed not to claim.

The register

Six members. Page counts are what the sitemaps report, not what the institutes claim. The register never ranks; the order below is by size alone.

Institute	Subject	Interior logic	Pages
Corpus	The scholarly record, read as a library	the reading rooms	8,692
Symbolic	How meaning is compressed into marks	the atlas & its cabinets	245
Hanzi Museum	Characters as cosmology — a wing of Symbolic	the museum of rooms	192
Written	The world's scripts as artefacts	the museum floors of type	94
Canto 粵學院	Cantonese culture first, language second	the geographic arc	24
Interfaces	Where the hand meets the machine	the building as grain-zoom	18

Verified 1 August 2026. A member that stops answering comes off the register the same day.

In outline

Named because they are promised, not because they exist. No domains are listed until there is something behind them.

Urbanity — the city inspected; the research floor beneath a city atlas
Hellenic — one unbroken language, thirty-four centuries
LocIntel — places graded in the open, the standard kept apart from the shop
Timesys — how civilisations have measured and structured time

The charter

One subject each. An institute holds one ground and names its borders.
One interior logic each, never repeated. Reading rooms, cabinets, floors, an arc, a grain-zoom — each institute is moved through differently.
Provenance over ranking. Every claim carries its source. An estimate is returned as an estimate, never as a confident wrong answer.
Grain, not rank. Ordering imposes one reader's decision on everyone. Where the material allows it, the decision is returned to the reader.
Corrections are published, not quietly made. A record that changes says so.
Institutes are standards, not stores. Applications and shops sit outside this register — they may cite an institute, never speak for it.

The treaty office

Where two institutes could claim the same ground, the border is written down, tested, and published. A treaty states what each holds, the test that decides an ambiguous case, and the worked examples that show it applied.

Treaty	The border	Status
Symbolic ↔ Written	Symbolic studies the encoding; Written studies the artefact. The test: could it be a poster, and does it still matter if you cannot see it?	Adopted
Symbolic ↔ Hanzi	Hanzi is a wing, not a peer. Han semantics are read at the Museum; Han typography at Written.	Standing
Urbanity ↔ athens.taipei	The research floor and the review desk: one explains the city, one reviews it.	Pending — awaits Urbanity

Outside the register