Yet another Hacker News

Ontology-Driven Observability: Building an End-to-End Knowledge Graph at Netflix

64 points tosh 2 hours ago 12 comments

antonvs 42 minutes ago | parent

> This agreement has a name: an ontology. Ontology is a formal specification of types, the properties they carry, and the relationships they may have. Its unit is the triple, one fact expressed as subject, predicate, object.

Er... nope.

In the limited context of OWL and RDF, that's what an ontology is. It has a much larger meaning outside of that context. As M-W puts it, ontology is "the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being."

Projected into computer science, an ontology is a formal model of concepts in a domain, their properties and relationships, along with axioms or constraints that apply to those concepts.

The "triple" described in the quote is an implementation detail, how a particular formalism (OWL and RDF) chooses to represent a rather pale shadow of what an ontology is conceptually.

robotresearcher 35 minutes ago | parent

The delightfully revealing fact that people don’t use the word ‘ontology’ to refer to exactly the same thing :)

j45 30 minutes ago | parent

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

shervinafshar 18 minutes ago | parent

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...

j45 5 minutes ago | parent

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

bendriv 14 minutes ago | parent

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?

j45 6 minutes ago | parent

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.

threecheese 8 minutes ago | parent

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 ".

j45 5 minutes ago | parent

Appreciate it, added to the list.

nico 14 minutes ago | parent

Is this like XML and UML all over again?

dominotw 10 minutes ago | parent

Netflix must have the most overengineered tech stack out there. Ppl hired with such high cash comp must feel the obligation to live upto that comp by creating these sort monsters.

1970-01-01 2 minutes ago | parent

Without actual examples of it working to reduce latency, this is purely academic and not engineering. What happened to the 1.5s problem in the introduction?