Ontology
The formal map of what the company calls a customer, lead, and order, and how they connect.
In one sentence
The formal map of the company’s concepts and their relationships: what a customer, lead, and order are, and how they connect. In a Cognitive Enterprise, a shared ontology is what ensures that all agents and humans speak the same language about the business.
Before
Each department calls it something different
What it does
Concepts and relationships defined
After
Agents and humans speak the same language
Example
In the organization, "child" can mean a sponsored child, a child served without a sponsor, or a child from a family being served. These are three different things that the same report calls by the same name.
Until this is written down, every agent will get it wrong, and every human will get it wrong in a different way, which is worse.
The common mistake
Treating ontology as documentation. It is a prerequisite for execution: an agent without an ontology produces a plausible answer about the wrong entity, and no one notices because the text is well written.
In practice
- Start with the 10 entities most often mentioned in meetings. They already reveal the conflicts.
- For each one: definition, what it is not, and how it relates to the others.
- Where two departments disagree, record the conflict instead of choosing silently.
How to make it tangible
A document with the business entities, the definition of each one, and how they relate. Start with the 10 most commonly used.
Connects with
Translated from Portuguese with AI assistance.