Gareth Williams
Principal Engineer
Wesfarmers
Ontologies: AI’s Operating Manual For Your Business
Ontologies: AI’s Operating Manual For Your Business
Tools churn. Factories commoditise. When everyone has the same models, the advantage goes to whoever gives their agents the clearest blueprint of how the business works - what exists, how it connects and the rules it runs on. That blueprint is an ontology.
In data.world's benchmark, an LLM querying enterprise SQL directly answered 16% of questions correctly. Over a knowledge graph with an ontology, 54%. With the ontology catching the model's bad queries for repair, 72%. Same questions. Only the modelling changed.
I'll untangle ontologies from knowledge graphs, semantic layers and taxonomies, then demo an open-source ontology I built for Monsters, Inc. (OWL, SHACL, SPARQL, PROV-O). Watch an agent refuse to skip a compliance step, a rule stop even the CEO exporting a child's data, and a validator catch three planted violations unaided.
You'll leave knowing how to start, and why AI has finally made one cheap to maintain.
Gareth Williams
Gareth Williams is a Principal AI Engineer at Wesfarmers AI Accelerator. He has spent fifteen years building software, most of it in regulated enterprise - banking (Westpac, Lloyds), funds (Colonial First State), energy (Shell Energy) and government - and the last two working out how to get agentic systems doing useful work without quietly making large mistakes.
Before OneDigital he was a Principal Solutions Architect at Versent, where he helped run the AI Guild and started the Tech Radar. He writes on Medium and Substack, mostly on ontologies: giving agents a working model of how the business actually operates. He also writes on comprehension debt and on agentic engineering - briefing, constraining and reviewing agents like the keen but amnesiac graduates they are.