it turns out what I was working on, and didn’t know what it was called then – was a “meta-framework”.
It’s only through working with chatGPT that I learned these different levels by repeatedly asking it questions. Things I thought were taxonomies were sometimes ontologies and things I thought were ontologies were sometimes frameworks and things I thought were frameworks were sometimes meta-frameworks. It’s not that you couldn’t use one for another but when asking it “is there a better category for this?” it’ll tell you.