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Are there any real success stories for "ontolgies" like this? It seems like a lot of them are made, but they're ultimately not that useful. I've been forced t

Are there any real success stories for "ontolgies" like this? It seems like a lot of them are made, but they're ultimately not that useful. I've been forced to use some, and it seems that someone got paid a lot of money to come up with something that's incomplete and poorly models the domain. So the net change is some XML doodads that no one really wanted or needed.

mercurialsolo 5y ago
Modern production pipelines have a lot of dynamic human fueled workflows with orchestration - having a common syntax definitely helps those in the control room and operating systems and tools have a common way to exchange - especially in a remote setup. The netflix production team also has done a great job of standardizing the vocabulary across their production systems. A lot of these ontologies depend on adoption in the organization and enforcement and without that these efforts really are show and of low utility.
halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
Disparate ontologies are ripe in the medical field (SNOMED, ICD 9/10, etc) and there are companies[1] trying to map between them for better interopt between healthcare networks. [1] https://clinicalarchitecture.com https://clinicalarchitecture.com
- danachow 5y ago
  Medical ontologies are different because there are two enormous economic incentives for their adoption: billing, in the US or any private healthcare - and medical research much of which is highly incentivized by the pharma, device, and diagnostic industries. Improving healthcare interop is not something that happens unless it is subsidized or penalized. 50 years of healthcare IT with systems that are basically the same with some new window dressing have proven that.
cbetti 5y ago
Yes. In the early 2000s Endeca made use of several public ontologies to enhance its information access and summarization products for clients. One particularly compelling example that comes to mind was an ontology involving public companies, figures, events, and relationships that was combined with NLP (entity and concept identification) over semi-structured content on the ETL side, and faceted search and navigation on the retrieval side, to replace a research portal for a major UK newspaper in the mid 2000s. The results were mind blowing.
andyjohnson0 5y ago
> Are there any real success stories for "ontolgies" like this? It seems like a lot of them are made, but they're ultimately not that useful. Back in the dot-com era I was marginally involved in a project proposal for a business spun-out of a logistics company. They had developed an ontology that supposedly captured their parent business's (admittedly extensive) knowledge of global logistics, and had then built a multi-layered process model on top of it. From what I recall, the business model was that you could buy vertical (logistics speciality) and horizontal (level of detail) slices through the model that would express a subset of the domain knowledge in a way that could be somehow implemented (or executed?). It seemed very clever, as did the people, and the one time I went to their offices the walls were pretty-much covered in diagrams and post-its defining their massive model. I heard later that they had shut-down due to lack of sales.
- kbenson 5y ago
  Sometimes it's hard to know if a business failed because the idea was bad, the market wasn't ready, they didn't execute well, they didn't advertise themselves effectively to let clients that could benefit know what they could offer, or some combination of multiple of those. What you described sounds really interesting and useful if I understand it correctly, and I can think of multiple times over the past decade plus that it would have been useful to use as a consultant for companies I've worked for, if it wasn't too costly.
  - andyjohnson0 5y ago
    > What you described sounds really interesting and useful if I understand it correctly, and I can think of multiple times over the past decade plus that it would have been useful to use as a consultant for companies I've worked for, if it wasn't too costly. Yeah I think I was maybe unfair on them to end it that way. They were probably ahead of their time, and it was a hard sell. I hope the people there went on to do more good things.
zozbot234 5y ago
Complex ontologies (including logical constraints, etc.) have mostly been a failure, but lightweight shared vocabularies/taxonomies can be very useful. See schema.org for a typical example of what these are like. BTW, XML has fallen out of use for this stuff. JSON-LD can be very convenient, though.
alex_c 5y ago
Music metadata (Musicbrainz, AllMusic, etc...) comes to mind. The data is usually more important than the ontology itself, and the ontology is not really consistent across the entire industry, but it's a somewhat relevant example.
- ok123456 5y ago
  The scope of those is pretty limited (i.e., helping people categorize their discogs with a dozen or so common fields) and isn't really a "musical ontology" where you're hooking it up to a first order logic solver and reasoning about music or whatever mythical use case drives most of that work.
  - alex_c 5y ago
    Sort of... They are used at scale to share and ingest data between services, for things like recommendations, etc. But it is messy, a lot of the ontology is more or less the same but every company/database does things slightly differently. Most of the difficulties are with matching artists and content across different databases, which is a separate issue. The ontology itself is tangential, but one example where it's important (even if it's not a fully / cleanly solved problem).
- SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
  Unfortunately the music field never had such collaborative effort to build a unified ontology, so each big player have its own ontology, and they are not very compatible. From personal experience, building software that consumes data from multiple sources in music is a nightmare, it is impossible to design a data model that fits all the incompatible ontologies.
  - alex_c 5y ago
    Agreed… and it’s too late to fix it now. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
marcosmr 5y ago
There are lots of examples of successful ontologies in the medical and biomedical domains https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ https://bioportal.bioontology.org/
abcanthur 5y ago
The building (AEC- architecture, engineering, construction) industries have the IFC format. https://technical.buildingsmart.org/standards/ifc/ https://technical.buildingsmart.org/standards/ifc/ This is meant to be an interop for various BIM (building information modeling) applications. The first generation of technical progress in AEC had been largely about computer generated geometry, but the lagging needs now are on the information attached to the geometry. In the US autodesk's Revit is dominant (and reviled) but the IFC open source development, namely ifcOpenShell & BlenderBIM, is rapidly reaching feature parity. The first computerized cohort of architects knows only AutoCAD, the current cohort will be all Revit, and I predict right now there is a new split coming as much better tools get built. Hypar.io, testfit, speckle etc are some of those tools. Ifc is likely to be a part of that, it's a fresher, cleaner take than awful Revit and opens up the information to much wider platforms.

mercurialsolo 5y ago

Modern production pipelines have a lot of dynamic human fueled workflows with orchestration - having a common syntax definitely helps those in the control room and operating systems and tools have a common way to exchange - especially in a remote setup. The netflix production team also has done a great job of standardizing the vocabulary across their production systems. A lot of these ontologies depend on adoption in the organization and enforcement and without that these efforts really are show and of low utility.

halfmatthalfcat 5y ago

Disparate ontologies are ripe in the medical field (SNOMED, ICD 9/10, etc) and there are companies[1] trying to map between them for better interopt between healthcare networks. [1] https://clinicalarchitecture.com https://clinicalarchitecture.com

danachow 5y ago
Medical ontologies are different because there are two enormous economic incentives for their adoption: billing, in the US or any private healthcare - and medical research much of which is highly incentivized by the pharma, device, and diagnostic industries. Improving healthcare interop is not something that happens unless it is subsidized or penalized. 50 years of healthcare IT with systems that are basically the same with some new window dressing have proven that.

cbetti 5y ago

Yes. In the early 2000s Endeca made use of several public ontologies to enhance its information access and summarization products for clients. One particularly compelling example that comes to mind was an ontology involving public companies, figures, events, and relationships that was combined with NLP (entity and concept identification) over semi-structured content on the ETL side, and faceted search and navigation on the retrieval side, to replace a research portal for a major UK newspaper in the mid 2000s. The results were mind blowing.

andyjohnson0 5y ago

> Are there any real success stories for "ontolgies" like this? It seems like a lot of them are made, but they're ultimately not that useful. Back in the dot-com era I was marginally involved in a project proposal for a business spun-out of a logistics company. They had developed an ontology that supposedly captured their parent business's (admittedly extensive) knowledge of global logistics, and had then built a multi-layered process model on top of it. From what I recall, the business model was that you could buy vertical (logistics speciality) and horizontal (level of detail) slices through the model that would express a subset of the domain knowledge in a way that could be somehow implemented (or executed?). It seemed very clever, as did the people, and the one time I went to their offices the walls were pretty-much covered in diagrams and post-its defining their massive model. I heard later that they had shut-down due to lack of sales.

kbenson 5y ago
Sometimes it's hard to know if a business failed because the idea was bad, the market wasn't ready, they didn't execute well, they didn't advertise themselves effectively to let clients that could benefit know what they could offer, or some combination of multiple of those. What you described sounds really interesting and useful if I understand it correctly, and I can think of multiple times over the past decade plus that it would have been useful to use as a consultant for companies I've worked for, if it wasn't too costly.
- andyjohnson0 5y ago
  > What you described sounds really interesting and useful if I understand it correctly, and I can think of multiple times over the past decade plus that it would have been useful to use as a consultant for companies I've worked for, if it wasn't too costly. Yeah I think I was maybe unfair on them to end it that way. They were probably ahead of their time, and it was a hard sell. I hope the people there went on to do more good things.

zozbot234 5y ago

Complex ontologies (including logical constraints, etc.) have mostly been a failure, but lightweight shared vocabularies/taxonomies can be very useful. See schema.org for a typical example of what these are like. BTW, XML has fallen out of use for this stuff. JSON-LD can be very convenient, though.

alex_c 5y ago

Music metadata (Musicbrainz, AllMusic, etc...) comes to mind. The data is usually more important than the ontology itself, and the ontology is not really consistent across the entire industry, but it's a somewhat relevant example.

ok123456 5y ago
The scope of those is pretty limited (i.e., helping people categorize their discogs with a dozen or so common fields) and isn't really a "musical ontology" where you're hooking it up to a first order logic solver and reasoning about music or whatever mythical use case drives most of that work.
- alex_c 5y ago
  Sort of... They are used at scale to share and ingest data between services, for things like recommendations, etc. But it is messy, a lot of the ontology is more or less the same but every company/database does things slightly differently. Most of the difficulties are with matching artists and content across different databases, which is a separate issue. The ontology itself is tangential, but one example where it's important (even if it's not a fully / cleanly solved problem).
SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
Unfortunately the music field never had such collaborative effort to build a unified ontology, so each big player have its own ontology, and they are not very compatible. From personal experience, building software that consumes data from multiple sources in music is a nightmare, it is impossible to design a data model that fits all the incompatible ontologies.
- alex_c 5y ago
  Agreed… and it’s too late to fix it now. Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/

marcosmr 5y ago

There are lots of examples of successful ontologies in the medical and biomedical domains https://bioportal.bioontology.org/ https://bioportal.bioontology.org/

abcanthur 5y ago

The building (AEC- architecture, engineering, construction) industries have the IFC format. https://technical.buildingsmart.org/standards/ifc/ https://technical.buildingsmart.org/standards/ifc/ This is meant to be an interop for various BIM (building information modeling) applications. The first generation of technical progress in AEC had been largely about computer generated geometry, but the lagging needs now are on the information attached to the geometry. In the US autodesk's Revit is dominant (and reviled) but the IFC open source development, namely ifcOpenShell & BlenderBIM, is rapidly reaching feature parity. The first computerized cohort of architects knows only AutoCAD, the current cohort will be all Revit, and I predict right now there is a new split coming as much better tools get built. Hypar.io, testfit, speckle etc are some of those tools. Ifc is likely to be a part of that, it's a fresher, cleaner take than awful Revit and opens up the information to much wider platforms.