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Comment by j45 | Hacker News Reader

I would welcome any and all links or resources about learning more about ontologies, including anyone's personal practice of/with them.

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SEP entry on "Ontology and Information Systems" is a good start: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontology-is/

If the preference is for books, I can recommend "Semantic web for the working ontologist: effective modeling for linked data, RDFS, and OWL". https://search.worldcat.org/title/1193030282

If the preference is for papers, two papers from Deborah McGuinness et al, from early 2000s are still my favorites:

- "Ontology development 101: A guide to creating your first ontology": https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

- "Ontologies come of age": https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...

Thanks so much. I'm open to any information in the space where/how people have seen or experienced it.

If you're looking for breadth, here's a bunch of Wikipedia categories that I sometimes revisit to pick out something that sounds interesting and new:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Technical_communicati...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Knowledge_representat...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Information_science

It really is a idea-rabbit hole though, and kind of hard to stop yourself from wanting to create N new projects based on every new idea and perspective you come across.

I made OrchidDB to let people express ontology layers over an existing iceberg data lake. It's just a SQL lowering system with a datafusion core for everything else.

Dig into LinkML; I've been eye-deep in defining an ontology for my life (which I struggle to grasp), and just getting into the tools forced me to learn ... outward. There's so much cool stuff, and now I have a mental model as well as a machine-based thing I can talk to (obv an LLM) having a "shared understanding ".

Appreciate it, added to the list.

It seems to be nearly impossible to find good resources about the subject as they have been crowded out by AI-related SEO-sites. But have you started with W3C’s specs on the subject? Ontologies, linked data, RDF, etc. In Norway we have a government agency publishing local adaption and guidance for these concepts and standards, so that is at least two sources of information on the general concepts and syntax at least. What are you looking for?

I found the same - it's definitely studied in academia, some people do seem to practice it, and there do seem to be some standards or frameworks in some places.

Besides AI/LLM the linked data ecosystem struggles with a deep adversion to the technology by the general developer population, dating back from the time when the Semantic Web hype cycle fizzled out. You can see that for instance very clearly on the Fediverse, where the ActivityPub [0] protocol is a W3C linked data based open standard. But ActivityPub can also be plain JSON, and most Fediverse software does not follow real JSON-LD approach. There's a lot of resistance to going the linked data route, being perceived as overly complex. Which is probably a fair assessment too, as the whole set of standards around linked data are large and intricate. As a result of Semantic Web and Linked Data failing to find good adoption, there's a chicken/egg that there's no good tooling to work with the technology and little incentive to create it.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

Good point. Here our gov organizations has been required to document their vocabularies, logical information models, data, services, etc and partly also processes, using linked data, so we are working with RDFLib and associated tooling. It has been an interesting ride so far.

Linked Data seems like a good fit for the some of the underlying components in teaching material and technical docs which feed into a knowledge layer for both humans and agents, but also very relevant in our archival/library-like processes. Due to the gov requirements, API surfaces will likely also be documented with Linked Data.

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