I’m not new to the space, I’ve been working in tech for a very long time. I was into ontologies since the late 90s. And I agree they were in general a colossal

I’m not new to the space, I’ve been working in tech for a very long time. I was into ontologies since the late 90s. And I agree they were in general a colossal failure, or at least didn’t live up to the general hype, they did find success in various niches and did have a big impact on the world. Tim Bernes-Lee was coming out with the semantic web stuff in 99, OWL ontologies is 2004. I did some interesting things with Freebase. I built out huge entity models and created an entirety extraction system to a help power a search engine for large scale cataloging which saw real world use. While not my work Bing and Wolfram Alpha did use such systems to improve their search/utility. Google bought Freebase and incorporated its functionality. The DoD did have success with it, and for a while Boeing had an interesting system but AFAIK they lost a lot of expertise and it atrophied somewhat. It was in general a library science thing, like search engines were, even today I wish I could disambiguate my search queries to be able to specify which word overloading I’m referring to, be it Java the language, the city, or the coffee. I’ve spent a decent amount of time trying to introduce these concepts to regular people and have long considered it generally hopeless. I went on to work in ML and I’ve long thought it would be easier to teach a computer to use these systems than regular people. At least AI is at a point now where it can act as a bridge.