According to the ontologist Barry Smith (forthcoming), with documentality, Ferraris advances an innovative approach to social ontology that implies three steps. The first step is the recognition – on the ground of the theories developed by Smith himself, (see in particular Smith 1999) – of the sphere of "social objects", meaning, entities such as money, artworks, marriages, divorces and joint custody, years in prison and mortgages, the cost of oil and the tax codes, the Nuremberg Trial and the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and still, economic crises, research projects, lectures and university degrees etc. These objects fill up our world more than stones, trees and coconuts do, and they are more important for us, given that a good part of our happiness or unhappiness depends on them. The second step is the identification of the law that brings social objects into being, namely that "Object = Inscribed Act"  What this means is that a social object is the result of a social act (one that involves at least two persons or a person and a deputed machine), which is characterized by the fact of being registered on a piece of paper, a computer file or some other digital support, or even, simply, in the heads of persons. As Smith recognizes, if taken literally, the OBJECT=Inscribed Act formulation does not make sense. For instance, if taken literally, this formulation implies that the US Constitution "is made of tiny oxidizing heaps of ink marks on parchment, and matters are helped only slightly if we add together all the printed and digital copies of the US Constitution and assert that the US Constitution is the mereological sum of all these multiple inscriptions." On the basis of the first two steps it is possible to develop an ontology capable of classifying documents and their selective storage, beginning with the grand divide between what Ferraris calls "strong documents" (inscriptions of acts), which make up social objects in the full sense, and "weak documents" (recordings of facts), which are secondary derivatives and of lesser importance. The third step thus leads to the individuation of the sphere of Documentality, understood as the search for and the definition of the properties that constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions for the being of a social object. The theory of Documentality has been summarized by his author (Ferraris 2009a) in eleven fundamental theses:  Documentality theory has been used in geopolitics and state theory as part of theory of understanding how nonphysical states can be established.