Ontologies and semantic technologies are becoming popular again. They were a hot topic in the early 2000s, but the tools needed to implement these concepts were not yet sufficiently mature. Ontology and semantic technologies have now matured to the point where they are widely available and reasonably priced. This has potentially vast benefits for organizations that are seeking to improve the use and reuse of their structured and unstructured information and want to maximize findability and discoverability. If you are like many of our clients, you are asking “What is an ontology and why do I want one?

Enterprise Knowledge defines an ontology as “a defined model that organizes structured and unstructured information through entities, their properties, and the way they relate to one another.” Many of you are familiar with terms like taxonomies and metadata. Think of an ontology as another way to classify content (like a taxonomy) that allows you to relate content based on the information in it as opposed to a term describing it. For example, you could create an ontology about your employees and consultants (see the image below.)

The example above shows an ontology of a company, its employees, consultants, and the projects they are working on. In this example, Kat Thomas is a consultant who is working with Bob Jones on a Sales Process Redesign project. Kat works for Consult, Inc and Bob reports to Alice Reddy. We can infer a lot of information through this ontology. Since the Sales Process Redesign is about sales we can infer that Kat Thomas and Bob Jones have expertise in sales. Consult, Inc must provide expertise in this area as well. We also know that Alice Reddy is likely responsible for some aspect of sales at Widgets, Inc because her direct report is working on the Sales Process Redesign project.

There are many reasons why this is valuable for your organization. Ontologies can allow your organization to:

• Manage content more effectively;
• Maximize findability and discoverability of information;
• Increase the reuse of “hidden” and unknown information; and
• Elevate SEO on external search engines.

Manage Content More Effectively

Content management is a time consuming process. It is one thing to manage metadata on a couple thousand pieces of content. What if you are managing hundreds of thousands of pieces of content? Ontologies are focused on relationships between entities. To extend the example above, I can identify content authored by Kat Thomas or Bob Jones and associate it with Sales information because Sales Process Redesign project is about sales. I no longer need to manually tag this content as I can rely on the entities in the content and the information I have about them.

Improved Findability

Ontologies give you new ways to find and discover content. Ontologies can power faceted search or allow people to browse through related content based on the people, places, and things that are mentioned in the text. I can see all of the deliverables created by Consultant, Inc and see all of the deliverables they have provided to my company. I can also see who works for them and who they have worked with at my company. I am navigating based on things that I understand to find relevant content and information.

Ontologies also allow for more accuracy in the way content is classified as opposed to classic metadata. For example, a piece of content on our intranet quotes Kat Thomas who at the time was an outside consultant. If we used the metadata approach her content might be tagged as consultant information. A year later Kat takes a job as head of sales. Using an ontology her recommendations would show up as recommendations from the head of sales. If I was just relying on metadata, I would have to go back and update my content to reflect her new position.

Greater Content Reuse

Publishers use ontologies to group content in new ways. The best example of this is the New York Times Topic Pages. All of the content related to famous people or topics are grouped on a single page. These articles appeared in the paper, but are now reused as a single place to learn all about a specific topic.

Content reuse is not limited to content on your site. Because ontologies are standards based, other sites can use your content to augment their content. As a result, your content appears in more places and is more likely to be seen by others.

Improved SEO

Ontologies are machine readable. This means that search engines are able to understand the content. As a result, content based on ontologies rates higher in Google and other search engines. Wordlift is a great example of an ontology plug-in for WordPress that promises to improve SEO.

I hope you have a better understanding of what an ontology is and why you might want one. If you are interested in implementing an ontology for your organization, take a look at my two part blog series on Ontology Design Best Practices. Part I describes best practices for any ontology design project. Part II provides specific recommendations for the design of the ontology.

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As a reminder, our most successful ontology projects deliver business users new and meaningful ways to see relationships between content and information. The complexity of the ontology is hidden from the business users who are able to discover related content without the need for formal or rigid navigation between content. The content owners/administrators are able to manage the relationships between content at a much more granular level with minimal additional effort. Often, these changes give our customers new ways to consolidate and present content and information both internal and external to their organization. Most importantly the value of these changes is visible to the project stakeholders and sponsors.

The design recommendations in this post assume that the project recommendations in Part I have already been implemented. These recommendations are focused on maximizing business value and usability.

Use Non-Technical Terms

Most ontology designers use terms like graphs, classes, nodes, and edges. Though these are accurate descriptions of what we are designing, they make ontologies seem unapproachable and difficult. Make a point of replacing these highly technical terms with terms that are more recognizable to your stakeholders.

It is important that you communicate regularly with your stakeholders. Using non-technical terms will make the project feel more approachable and more business focused. As a result, it will be easier to get feedback from your stakeholders on their wants and needs.

Identify Your Domain 

The first step in creating an ontology is to identify the domain to which it belongs. By this, I mean the category or topical area the ontology describes. This cannot be done in a vacuum. Review your content and then come up with 3-4 terms that describe your domain. Use these terms to search for public ontologies with similar domains. To find similar domains that are publicly available, look in places like the following: 

• http://wiki.DBPedia.org
• http://protegewiki.stanford.edu/wiki/Protege_Ontology_Library
• http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Ontology.html
• https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ontology
• http://ontologydesignpatterns.org
• http://schema.org/  

Evaluate the content and entities in these public domains to see which one is most closely aligned with the content and entities in your domain. Use the public domain as the starting point for the rest of your work. Not only will this give you a headstart on the work, it will also ensure that you are following a standard that others use so that you can more easily integrate your domain with others.

Prioritize the Entities to Model 

Each ontology has a list of classes (think entities or types of things) that need to be modeled. For example, an ontology about people in an organization would likely include the following entities:

It would be very easy to create a huge list of entities for any domain that you work with. Many people begin by creating an exhaustive list to make sure they capture everything. This is a common mistake for people creating their first ontology. Start with a smaller list of entities that are easily recognizable and model those first. Prioritize the entities to develop through the use cases and goals you defined at the beginning of the project. This approach will save time and allow you to show value sooner. It will also result in a design that meets the business needs without introducing undue complexity and clutter.

Minimize Characteristics and Look for Patterns

The next step is to model the characteristics of these entities. If you are following a standard, some of this work may already be done for you. Some standards allow for a great deal of flexibility to define these characteristics. In these cases, you will need to make decisions about how much information you want to manage. Minimize the number of characteristics you capture though the use cases and goals for the project. Less is always better as you start out. Also, look for repeatable patterns that can be applied to as many entities as possible. Consistency among entities simplifies implementation and simplifies the way content can be queried using the SQL-like query language (SparQL).

Prioritize Relationships

Identifying the ways in which entities are related is one of the most powerful features of semantic ontologies. It is, unfortunately, also one of the easiest ways to create an ontology that is overly complex. Review the goals for your ontology. Prioritize the types of relationships to those that directly support the goals of your taxonomy. Try to limit these relationship types to less than 5 if possible. As with all of these things, it is better to start small and grow than to try and be comprehensive with your first ontology.

Validate your Design

Ontologies can be confusing to people who have never worked with them before. This does not mean that you should develop the ontology in a vacuum or without validation. Make sure you have a visual representation of your ontology and share it with the project stakeholders at every stopping point in the project. Show how the ontology relates to their content and information and how it will help them meet the objectives defined at the beginning of the project.

This feedback loop accomplishes three things:

• Your stakeholders see progress and understand why they are developing an ontology.
• The stakeholders may spot things that are missing, and
• You can validate that the design is easy to understand.

It is important that this is done before the ontology and its related features are implemented so that you do not go down the wrong path.

Ontologies offer a powerful way to manage and present content. Technology has advanced to the point where the ontologies and the semantic web are now a reality. An effective ontology can:

• Provide new ways to navigate and find content,
• Expose relationships between content that were once not visible, and
• Provide a seamless view of content across organizations.

I encourage all of you to consider how an ontology can improve your content or knowledge management sites. We are happy to help if you need ontology consultants to assist in the design of your ontology. Contact us at info@enterprise-knowledge.com.

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