Your Ontology - Your IP
An ontology is like a map of your organisation’s knowledge, built on the concepts and relationships that define your domain. Think of it as your company’s DNA—a compressed representation of what you know and how you think. When developed properly, your ontology doesn’t just support your AI; it becomes a core piece of your intellectual property.
Ironically, one of the keys to keeping your ontology yours is to adopt open standards. This works on several levels, allowing you to speak a common language for collaboration while preserving the distinctive knowledge that makes your business stand out.
🔵 Formally Defining the Difference
Open standards such as Schema.org, the Gene Ontology, or the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO) provide a foundation for connecting your data to the broader ecosystem. They cover the common ground—what everyone knows. However, your organisation’s true value lies in the things that only you know. That’s where your proprietary extensions of general ontologies come in, formalising the knowledge that sets you apart.
🔵 Preventing Vendor Lock-In
Organisations often rely on vendors to help build, utilise, and maintain their schemas and ontologies. However, it’s crucial to avoid scenarios where a vendor locks the organisation in by using a proprietary schema format—or, worse, incorporates the intellectual property embedded in the metadata into their own product. Ontologies like Schema.org, the Gene Ontology, and FIBO all follow the same underlying open standards for defining schemas. Adopting this open standard for specifying your ontology prevents vendor lock-in, allowing multiple vendors to interoperate for the organisation’s benefit—which is exactly as it should be.
🔵 The Power of Out-of-Distribution Knowledge
Huge disruption is coming as a result of AI, so keep this fact in mind, foundational AI models are typically trained on large, generic datasets, which means they often represent an average or “flattened” understanding of data distributions. To provide exceptional value, AI systems must be trained on out-of-distribution knowledge—data that falls outside common patterns—the things that only you know.
Proprietary ontologies provide a compressed semantic index of your unique know-how, enabling AI models to deliver insights that are both novel and highly relevant to your organisation’s specific context. If that isn’t IP, I don’t know what is.
So, remember—your ontology is yours!
⭕ Limits to Sharing: https://www.knowledge-graph-guys.com/blog/limits-to-sharing
⭕ Ontological Core: https://www.knowledge-graph-guys.com/blog/your-ontological-core
