Automatic ontology creation
The race to automate ontology creation is clearly on and it’s moving faster than people realize.
The demand for taxonomists and ontologist might come to an halt. It simply takes too long for companies in need of tens, hundreds or sometimes thousands of ontologies.
I see three flavors of automation emerging, but do let me know if you have some other magic.
The LLM-native builders like Perseus (Lettria) generates ontologies directly from text exported in RDF. Fine-tuning LLMs with heaps of data. It won’t replace a seasoned ontologist, but it lowers the entry cost dramatically. The research community is moving fast here too: frameworks like Ontogenia show that LLMs can produce logical axioms at consistency levels comparable to junior human modelers.
There is the enterprise graph platform like Stardog’s Voicebox. It ships basic ontology generation via a GenAI multi-agent system. Their thesis is blunt: coverage beats perfection. A system-generated ontology that’s 80% right and deployed is worth more than a perfect one still in a workshop.
You also have the SQL-native pragmatists. Timbr.ai is probably the most aggressive automation play right now. They auto-generate an ontology draft from your existing schema (Snowflake, Salesforce, Databricks, whatnot) and let you refine from there. Mind, it ain’t OWL. It’s SQL-native and virtual. Not for RDF believers but it’s winning on adoption.
And then… the platform giants decided they wanted in.
Snowflake shipped Semantic View Autopilot. Databricks took Unity Catalog Business Semantics to GA. Microsoft unveiled Fabric IQ Ontology with MCP endpoints. Google’s Looker BI Agents are grounded in an auto-generated Knowledge Catalog semantic graph. Collibra launched Semantic Agents that read your existing business glossaries and generate semantic models from them. Spoke about these before.
The interesting open question is: will the pragmatic SQL-native approaches pull formal ontology down-market and make it mainstream? Or will the OWL/RDF community watch the world absorb the term “ontology” and use it to mean something quite different? Neither, of course. The world is complex and we create ever more diverse solutions. The second law of thermodynamics comes to mind.