Deep-dive | Semantic Layers Translate — Ontologies Reason — And here is why that doesn’t matter for enterprises (for now)!

There is a seminal paper in Nature magazine a few years ago on Knowledge Graphs that I would highly recommend reading.

This post is to deep-dive from theory to practice from scratch. We will build all the layers of the ontology stack by hand.

After that, do nothing. For now, anyway.

I don’t have anything against Knowledge Graphs. These are esoteric for enterprises. Too “hand-wavy” to obtain budgets. The forces of Conway’s law will stop enterprises from getting any sort of meaningful return on investment.

But we do need to know in-depth how these work and why LLMs are going to accelerate the use of ontologies. So, read on.

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Technology companies, on the other hand, got them right. Microsoft Graph, Google Knowledge Graph, and Palantir OSDK are Northstar products in their own ways.

I have a glossary of terms that you should be familiar with before reviewing the code. They are at the bottom of the post. Check them out.

Whether we realize it or not, we already use the semantic layer in our day-to-day.