hierarchies also allowed ambiguous queries to be clarified by asking questions about the parts and their applications. When they searched, the search results were grouped in a way that made sense to the technician—that fit their “mental model” of the problem and solution. These changes enabled the computer to give the technicians what they were seeking using the terms they were likely to be thinking about, rather than forcing them to root through masses of information with terms they might not recognize, organized in incompatible ways more accessible to computers than to humans. The result was a system that reduced the time that field technicians spent searching for information by half. The company estimated their savings at tens of millions of dollars per year. We enabled technicians to reduce their component and replacement part inventories and speed turnaround time for down fabrication plants.
And Applied Materials was able to live up to its reputation as a global leader in chip manufacturing, an essential element for its future business success.
WHY ONTOLOGIES MATTER
With the speed and effectiveness of the company at stake, building an ontology is not just an IT project. It is one that should matter to every CEO, CMO, and senior manager inside your company. Once you create the framework for the ontology, you can get more from your current investments in technology and apply emerging artificial intelligence techniques to drive your business. The ontology is the tool that teaches intelligent machines how your business runs. Without it, neither your systems nor your employees can truly understand how to access and organize the lifeblood of the business—the knowledge and information that provides value for your customers and the marketplace.
Ontologies are the secret weapon that will bring you victory in the battle for customers by transforming your company into an AI-powered enterprise. AI capabilities, supported by an ontology, will allow employees and the systems they use to function faster than ever before. It becomes a supercharger for your business. It helps you get products and services to market faster, serve customers more efficiently, and take advantage of quickly emerging opportunities in the marketplace. With the streamlined information flows that the ontology supports, both automated systems and humans can make better decisions.
Your ontology has the potential to accelerate your enterprise whether you work in retail, finance, health care, government, or any other sector. Once ontology-powered AI is in place, you can create:
•apps that suggest exactly the right product for each customer, based on history, context, inventory, and even the weather;
•tools that facilitate team meetings by suggesting the best solutions to your toughest problems;
•audience insights based not on superficial attributes like age but on people’s secret motivations—along with product improvements that match those motivations;
•sales improvements that prioritize the leads that are most likely to generate more profit and make this determination more quickly than any other method now available;
•systems that predict when equipment will fail and proactively order maintenance before disaster strikes;
•virtual assistants that provide new capabilities and levels of service at a lower cost than previously possible; and
•bots that will help engineers solve challenging design and manufacturing problems by embodying the knowledge and expertise currently in the heads of your own experts—much as Applied Materials did.
Ontologies speed the information metabolism of the enterprise, forming the foundation for improved search, information management, and digital asset retrieval. They support mechanisms that improve communication among systems by acting as the Rosetta Stone of system integration.
Think of an ontology as a “knowledge chart of accounts” for marketing, engineering, finance, human resources, operations, and sales. Ontologies form the source of features for predictive analytics programs to improve their performance. They are the source of labels for navigational elements on an ecommerce website. They are the foundation for improved customer service since they contain knowledge of customers, problems, processes, and solutions. They provide improved business insights and intelligence by allowing for consistent analysis of products, revenue, costs, efficiencies, and metrics across the enterprise. They are the source of rights-management attributes and can help manage risks, exposures, and compliance.
Since the virtual world is entirely composed of data, victory will go to the organizations that can best control, manipulate, and exploit that data to attract customers and provide what those customers need, sometimes before they know they need it. Companies that do this will gain an edge in the AI future, while other companies will suffer competitive losses. Organizations cannot gain this edge and do so successfully, cost-effectively, and at scale without investing in the foundation of correctly designed and applied ontologies.
Why is it important to have a framework for organizing information? It can provide a competitive advantage based on how you envision your business, and you can differentiate your company by anticipating what your customers will need and by doing some of the heavy lifting for them. If your company is dependent on an individual for facilitating customer interactions, developing an effective ontology can buffer the impact if the individual leaves the company, or it can help you scale up to reach more customers.
In the rest of this chapter, I’ll show you more about why ontologies matter, what they include, and how to build them.
UNDERSTANDING ONTOLOGIES
The term ontology refers to a domain of knowledge and the relationships among different concepts. The idea originally comes from philosophy, where ontology is the study of the nature of relations and being.
An ontology allows people and systems to understand relationships between concepts, just as a reference librarian can guide someone looking for information at a library. Someone seeking information may not know that valuable information about a subject can be found in a particular section of the library, or they may not know the best place to locate information that is less commonly available. This is similar to a book index, in which the “see also” entries guide the reader to another location that they might not have otherwise found or looked at.
Ontologies are built up from taxonomies. A taxonomy is a clearly defined hierarchical structure for categorizing information. Most people are familiar with the taxonomic classification system for animals, which includes invertebrates and vertebrates, and within the vertebrate category, birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals. Similarly, the Dewey Decimal System is a taxonomy for categorizing books.
Taxonomies and ontologies have different purposes and uses. On a website for home products, a taxonomy could classify different departments such as lumber, tools, lighting, and appliances. Within each category, there could be subcategories such as hand tools and power tools, or refrigerators and stoves. In many cases, a taxonomy like this is sufficient for prospective customers to locate the items they need. However, a different level of sophistication can be achieved by overlaying this information with an ontology that adds richer information on products. This step would be required to respond to answers to questions such as “What are you trying to do?” If the answer is “Build a deck,” then the store could present a suggested list that included supporting posts, decking lumber, deck screws, and a circular saw. Ontologies are a key ingredient for personalization and proactive marketing.
Ontologies Power Meaningful AI Capabilities
Ontologies begin as a holistic understanding of the language of the business and the customer, and are then designed into processes, applications, navigational structures, content, data models, and the relationships between concepts.
