In the context of the paper, the entire book seems to go downhill from the definition of ontology for me.
There is no benefit of using Gruber's ivory tower definition. A simpler explanation (e.g., it describes a structured framework that defines and categorizes the entities within a specific domain and the relationships among those entities) would have sufficed, and easier to digest.
Palantir is doing nothing revolutionary or "paradigm shift" when it comes to data and information organization. Their secret weapon is not introducing ontology to information.
Ching (1000BC?) classified reality into binary ontological primitives, created trigrams and hexagrams a combinatorial ontology. Aristotle introduced categories, substance, properties, relations, etc. Thomas Aquinas systemized Aristotelian categories into theological knowledge systems, and used structured classifications.
I am becoming curmudgeony as I see more and more of these reverse-research papers. Write the paper, then find references that fit the statement and use weasel words ...
unbelievable scene unfolds, deep-rooted disease of silos, paradigm shift, fatal flaws, forged in these extreme environments, eliminated to the absolute limit...
Palantir's secret weapon is the closeness and affinity to the DoD.
The tech stack ontological model is flexible like Salesforce so that it can be jammed into any task or contract quicky. It isn't engineered, it's glued in.
They're able to do this fast because they have a flexible model and because they have the friendly relationships.
Their moat deepens every year with every new integration.
It's smart as hell, actually. That's why they're swimming in money. And government contracts are about as lucrative as you can get.
Engineers turn their nose at this, but look who has tapped into this wealthy revenue stream. While we preen about good architecture, they can retire for a thousand thousand lifetimes.
> Palantir's secret weapon is the closeness and affinity to the DoD.
Is it a secret? I got an impression that it has been well known. How could you get any big number contracts without former secretaries or retired generals in your board or in your ‘consulting’ team?
Ontology is not a buzzword. It's precision nomenclature.
We've been using ontology well before RDF and the semantic web. It precisely describes their flexible engineering approach of using entities, definitions, and relationships.
If you read the comment a little more closely, it is very obvious that the "this" engineers turn their noses up at is the flexible model full of glue code, ala Salesforce, as opposed to "good architecture".
It's more or less in the same vein as pointing out that WordPress powered a massive chunk of the Internet despite violating almost every good coding practice you can name, and that getting things done is what makes money, not building ivory towers.
The fact that you turned that argument into some sort of anti American screed says much more about you than the parent.
That is why I called it tone deaf, I admit the part about American Imperialism may have been unwarranted (may is in emphasis for a reason).
This engineer turned their nose at the bad architecture and glue code, but neglected to mention the total lack of morality from Palantir. I would argue that abandoning morality and aiding the American imperalist machine in its war against human rights and dignity, has been a much bigger reason for Palantir’s success then their lack of good engineering practice. They are willing to get paid for something most people morally object to. Lots of engineers are willing to abandon their craftsmanship if it pays well enough, few their morals.
Perhaps I read too much into this absence, in which case the post is only tone deaf, but I favor the read where this absence was intentional, in which case it is both tone deaf and American imperialist.
I don't think it's at all fair to make this kinds of inference from what was written, you'd have to make huge assumptions, and also take an ideological perspective as well. It might be a perfectly valid critique ... but it can't be at all inferred from the comment.
Perhaps gov contractor speak would be more accurate. I'd think a corp with an org sufficiently aligned to their business value and profit motive wouldn't stand for the fancy speak either
Pretty much any SQL book will cover it those, and there's a bunch of online SQL tutorials. UDF means user defined function, so if there's some function you want to perform in SQL but that function doesn't come out of the box, you can just write your own. And those can be defined in non-SQL syntax, such as UDF's written in python or C++, which can be pretty handy.
I'm having a blast with using PostgreSQL to hold unstructured data in JSON-B and then creating views off of that that "feel" like more conventional SQL.
If performance becomes an issue, just turn it into an MV... and then consider some indexing on the JSON itself.
The paypal mafia are all about stories. They can attract talent and investor money with those stories, but they are just tall tales full of hype, and people are catching on (ok that last bit might be a hopium).
palantir doesn't do revolutionary things in terms of back-ends. matter of fact, their apps are at best mid. I'd rate them 3/10 compared to alternatives that can do similar things. Their front end is the real differentiator.
Their bread-and-butter is a few things
1) Willing to do dirty/harmful things no one else will touch
2) Making data and data analysis accessible to cops, dhs, anyone that is especially tech-averse (many police departments disqualify based on IQ test results measuring too high). You can type in a license plate, a name, an address, scan a face and it will show you every relevant information, but also contextualizes it and enriches it with any other data. You could to this in excel, postgresql, bigquery, etc.. but palantir gives these people simple text boxes, buttons, and links.
3) Their forward deployed engineers are great at what they do. They station their guys wherever Palantir is being used, and they'll work very closely to get things done. to make sure all problems are solved asap, and its users are very well educated on the usage of the platform.
This post looks like it's written by AI, but assuming it is in earnest, it isn't really ontology, at least no more than object oriented programming is ontology. Excel is all about numbers, palantir is all about people (or people-documents). It is simpler than excel and has BigQuery level analytical power behind it, and the human touch to make that interaction go over really well.
I said it's mid because you could do a lot more with just the dataset and queries. You could even possibly do more with command line tools and hoards of data files (minus the OCR and document scanning they do, as well as LLM/NLP). but that isn't accessible and takes a lot more time. Not to mention normalizing, extracting and structuring wildy unstructured data isn't easy. But with BigQ for example, it is done plenty, you just hire a team to do that for you typically.
Their ecosystem is basically google search (including image, reverse image,video,etc..) but much more targeted and oriented towards displaying collated data from hoards of structured and unstructured data (including pdfs, docx,etc..). I would prefer grep, bigquery,splunk myself. but for end users, palantir is unmatched in my experience.
But I'm not selling them here, I'm trying to communicate the power at the disposal of those who use palantir's platforms. Google could have crushed them any time, except even for Google the type of work required was too ghoulish and reputationally risky.
Even with MS copilot(lol), chatgpt, gemini,etc.. running as agents, they're not as simply as palantir's stuff is for searching your data. and you don't have specialists integrating all your data onsite either.
Ultimately, the bigger problem is that even in crowds like HN's, no one seems to have a good idea of what should be done about governments abusing datascience so efficiently. Every answer comes back to red-tapes and regulations, possibly criminal consequence. Are you willing to give up the liberties tech has enjoyed so that future generations can be well, and have shot at peace and prosperity? (ours is too far gone in my opinion)?
China is doing this too, but much more efficiently, much better and at a greater scale. but their society has accepted this, and traded certain liberties for social stability and economic prosperity. The west hasn't done that. lawmakers and the public at large need to be informed by those in tech about these things so informed decisions could be made.
It doesnt matter who does search well, if you understand the implications of the theory of bounded rationality and what claude shannons information theory tells us about bandwith limitations of individual and group cognition.
> Ultimately, the bigger problem is that even in crowds like HN's, no one seems to have a good idea of what should be done about governments abusing datascience so efficiently.
The general-populace/crowd/mob has already lost this game. Govts/Companies (all of them irrespective of ethics/democracy/etc.) are doing what they want with data and datascience. The populace is easily propagandized/distracted from reality and can be easily cocooned.
The only recourse left for the individual is to learn and start playing the game himself. Fortunately the new tools are a great help in this asymmetric warfare. Organizations like EFF/OpenSource/GNU/etc. need to take the lead on this since most people are like sheep when it comes to uses/misuses of technology.
Palantir is just "Cambridge Analytica" redux but with more money/connections/data/breadth/depth/etc. Watch this old presentation by their then ceo Alexander Nix and extrapolate to today's AI world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc
Finally go and read the works of George Orwell, Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul, Marshall Mcluhan, Noam Chomsky etc. on the whole subject of Propaganda/Manipulation to really understand where we are now.
You can't fight this with tech. The problem is not technological. You don't have the data to fight with either. You could live in an igloo in the arctic with no tech on hand you'll still show up in palantir's hits (unless you were born there and have nothing to trace you back to civilization). Those organizations you mention might help with corporate surveillance capitalism, but not government data mining and surveillance. Palantir is not the same as Cambridge analytica, they're more similar to Microsoft and Google. In simpler terms, they provide the sql db, sql client, and the db admins to manage the data, as well as support to train users. They don't do the analysis and action on objectives for governments, they're not a consultancy firm like cambridge.
Under rule of law, you need laws. Outside of rule of law, well..
The idea is to protect oneself by using various techniques of deception/reflexive control through stratagems like "poisoning the well", "borrow a knife", "misdirect/misinform" etc. to present different contradictory information/personas/overload-data to "The System" thus obfuscating/masking reality.
You mess-up the raw data and then use reflexive control techniques to allow them to draw inferences from a set that you have predetermined.
Technology, mass commoditized and given easy access to, is central here and should be spearheaded by the organizations i mentioned due to their reputation cachet eg; Tor/Tails/Proxies/Vpns/Secure OSes/Protocols/etc. Simultaneously they should also push for legislation for stricter govt. control over data usage/companies eg. GDPR/etc.
The populace also needs to educate themselves on techniques of Propaganda/Manipulation by reading the works of the authors i mentioned earlier. This will sharpen their critical thinking skills which is a must-have today.
Palantir is very much in the vein of Cambridge Analytica except that they have expanded vastly on its theme and gained "legitimacy". People need to study all about CA and then extrapolate it to today's AI capabilities if they want to understand the shape of things to come.
Some References:
Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA by Edward Jay Epstein; For history/ideas/themes/motivation for further study on a complex subject.
The real insight buried in this thread is that Palantir's moat has nothing to do with ontology as a concept - it's that they solved the data integration problem for organizations that are deeply allergic to engineering. Every large org I've worked with has the same issue: dozens of data sources, no consistent schema, and teams that refuse to standardize. Palantir just charges a premium to do the dirty work of normalization and relationship mapping that most internal teams can't get funding or political buy-in for. You could replicate the tech with a graph DB and some ETL pipelines, but good luck getting a government agency to build and maintain that internally.
What is this AI slop doing at the top of HN? Come on, you don't even have to click through to know it's slop! It even has an en dash right in the title!
I find myself distinctly unimpressed by the idea that slapping a nice UI and some TS/SCI controls on top of a graph database — the latter being something that NSA did, with considerably more sophistication, years prior in a Neo4J fork — is some kind of brilliant conceptual moat. Graph DBs are useful for certain kinds of problems, which happen to map well to counterterror social mapping strategies, this is nothing particularly new or noteworthy.
I've learned this stuff as a hobby, so take it with a grain of salt. I'm not a specialist.
OWL 1, for example, has stuff like transitive properties (the classical example is A ancestorOf B, B ancestorOf C, therefore I can infer A ancestorOf C if I annotate ancestorOf as a transitive property).
Union, equivalence, inversion, symmetries, cardinality. Those are all possible to represent symbolic in OWL ontologies.
They're also neatly separated in different types (OWL Lite, OWL DL, OWL Full). OWL Lite and DL for example are proven to be decidable (you won't get some halt when doing inference, no matter what).
I know there are plenty of database engines to store triples and graphs, and plenty of reasoners out there.
I haven't studied OWL 2 yet or newer stuff like SHACL, but I know it's supposed to be even better.
I worked at a company where the VPs etc spewed the word "ontology" all the time. We were never sure if they knew they were spewing bullshit or they really believed what they were saying was real.
Ontology is one of those fancy words that sounds important but is basically, as another poster pointed out, a standardized vocabulary.
#### The Paradigm Shift Brought by Palantir: Ontology as an Operational Layer
The *"Ontology"* strategy by Palantir, explained in this book, is a paradigm shift that fundamentally breaks this deep-rooted disease of silos.
In the context of knowledge engineering and the semantic web, the widely cited academic definition of "ontology" is an "explicit specification of a conceptualization" by Gruber (1993).
Furthermore, Studer et al. (1998) expanded on this, proposing the definition of a "formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization."
This transition from "data just for viewing" to "data that directly drives the business" is the key to true digital transformation in the AI era.
[end]
Just gave me brain damage. Please for the love of god just go straight to the point. Just give me the prompts that wrote all of this.
Palantir is just "Cambridge Analytica" redux but with more money/connections/data/breadth/depth/etc. Their ethical/moral stance i will leave it to you to infer.
It’s just a consulting firm with connections to the Trump administration through Thiel. That’s why they need forward engineers. It’s not a real platform. Ontology is as far as I can tell, a marketing buzzword, mostly repeated by bots to pump Palantir.
Eccentric CEO (we already have Elon another is one too many …) wildly overpriced stock and company and also one without any ethics that’s super close to the Trump admin … I for one am praying this company collapses. I’d love to read a HN post about how they go chapter 11 and leave the public eye.
I really wanted this "book" to be good.
In the context of the paper, the entire book seems to go downhill from the definition of ontology for me.
There is no benefit of using Gruber's ivory tower definition. A simpler explanation (e.g., it describes a structured framework that defines and categorizes the entities within a specific domain and the relationships among those entities) would have sufficed, and easier to digest.
Palantir is doing nothing revolutionary or "paradigm shift" when it comes to data and information organization. Their secret weapon is not introducing ontology to information.
Ching (1000BC?) classified reality into binary ontological primitives, created trigrams and hexagrams a combinatorial ontology. Aristotle introduced categories, substance, properties, relations, etc. Thomas Aquinas systemized Aristotelian categories into theological knowledge systems, and used structured classifications.
I am becoming curmudgeony as I see more and more of these reverse-research papers. Write the paper, then find references that fit the statement and use weasel words ...
unbelievable scene unfolds, deep-rooted disease of silos, paradigm shift, fatal flaws, forged in these extreme environments, eliminated to the absolute limit...
Gag me.
This feels like pets.com made by Accenture consultants.
Palantir's secret weapon is the closeness and affinity to the DoD.
The tech stack ontological model is flexible like Salesforce so that it can be jammed into any task or contract quicky. It isn't engineered, it's glued in.
They're able to do this fast because they have a flexible model and because they have the friendly relationships.
Their moat deepens every year with every new integration.
It's smart as hell, actually. That's why they're swimming in money. And government contracts are about as lucrative as you can get.
Engineers turn their nose at this, but look who has tapped into this wealthy revenue stream. While we preen about good architecture, they can retire for a thousand thousand lifetimes.
> Palantir's secret weapon is the closeness and affinity to the DoD.
Is it a secret? I got an impression that it has been well known. How could you get any big number contracts without former secretaries or retired generals in your board or in your ‘consulting’ team?
I'm quipping about the title, sorry.
Palantir does not have infinity money, and 'ontology' is a buzzword.
They're a gov. contracting agency, with some re-usable components, that's it.
If they deliver stuff that works, good, if not, bad.
There's nothing interesting about 'ontology'
Ontology is not a buzzword. It's precision nomenclature.
We've been using ontology well before RDF and the semantic web. It precisely describes their flexible engineering approach of using entities, definitions, and relationships.
> Engineers turn their nose at this, but look who has tapped into this wealthy revenue stream.
This may be one of the most tone deaf, american imperialist sentiment, I’ve heard on HN for a while.
Engineers who have any sense of morality have a pretty good reason to turn their nose at this, and there is no but needed to follow that sentence.
If you read the comment a little more closely, it is very obvious that the "this" engineers turn their noses up at is the flexible model full of glue code, ala Salesforce, as opposed to "good architecture".
It's more or less in the same vein as pointing out that WordPress powered a massive chunk of the Internet despite violating almost every good coding practice you can name, and that getting things done is what makes money, not building ivory towers.
The fact that you turned that argument into some sort of anti American screed says much more about you than the parent.
That is why I called it tone deaf, I admit the part about American Imperialism may have been unwarranted (may is in emphasis for a reason).
This engineer turned their nose at the bad architecture and glue code, but neglected to mention the total lack of morality from Palantir. I would argue that abandoning morality and aiding the American imperalist machine in its war against human rights and dignity, has been a much bigger reason for Palantir’s success then their lack of good engineering practice. They are willing to get paid for something most people morally object to. Lots of engineers are willing to abandon their craftsmanship if it pays well enough, few their morals.
Perhaps I read too much into this absence, in which case the post is only tone deaf, but I favor the read where this absence was intentional, in which case it is both tone deaf and American imperialist.
I don't think it's at all fair to make this kinds of inference from what was written, you'd have to make huge assumptions, and also take an ideological perspective as well. It might be a perfectly valid critique ... but it can't be at all inferred from the comment.
This seems to be the English landing page: https://github.com/Leading-AI-IO/palantir-ontology-strategy/...
I think their secret weapon is their opensource UI library.
https://blueprintjs.com/
I've been tracking this project since 2018. It hasn't changed drastically since then, but man it was polished and robust library.
It's just view, materialized view, udf, stored procedure in fancy corp speak.
> fancy corp speak
Perhaps gov contractor speak would be more accurate. I'd think a corp with an org sufficiently aligned to their business value and profit motive wouldn't stand for the fancy speak either
Do you have any resources or books to learn all the details of all these?
Also, what is UDF?
Pretty much any SQL book will cover it those, and there's a bunch of online SQL tutorials. UDF means user defined function, so if there's some function you want to perform in SQL but that function doesn't come out of the box, you can just write your own. And those can be defined in non-SQL syntax, such as UDF's written in python or C++, which can be pretty handy.
> python or C++
Also sometimes Lua, which is kinda a nice middleground between c++ efficiency and python ease of writing
User defined functions
Data warehouse toolkit for Kimball
Google will inmon for the info factory
Google data vault
Joe reis is the guy for tying it up with a modern bow recently.
Designing data intensive applications book
Believe it or not, this stuff is still incredibly valuable.
I have to admit, those fancy concepts pay the bills.
I'm having a blast with using PostgreSQL to hold unstructured data in JSON-B and then creating views off of that that "feel" like more conventional SQL.
If performance becomes an issue, just turn it into an MV... and then consider some indexing on the JSON itself.
> fancy Karp speak.
The paypal mafia are all about stories. They can attract talent and investor money with those stories, but they are just tall tales full of hype, and people are catching on (ok that last bit might be a hopium).
I wonder if Michael Bury's puts printed. The stock is down about 30% from when I think he announced them.
Reads like AI
palantir doesn't do revolutionary things in terms of back-ends. matter of fact, their apps are at best mid. I'd rate them 3/10 compared to alternatives that can do similar things. Their front end is the real differentiator.
Their bread-and-butter is a few things
1) Willing to do dirty/harmful things no one else will touch
2) Making data and data analysis accessible to cops, dhs, anyone that is especially tech-averse (many police departments disqualify based on IQ test results measuring too high). You can type in a license plate, a name, an address, scan a face and it will show you every relevant information, but also contextualizes it and enriches it with any other data. You could to this in excel, postgresql, bigquery, etc.. but palantir gives these people simple text boxes, buttons, and links.
3) Their forward deployed engineers are great at what they do. They station their guys wherever Palantir is being used, and they'll work very closely to get things done. to make sure all problems are solved asap, and its users are very well educated on the usage of the platform.
This post looks like it's written by AI, but assuming it is in earnest, it isn't really ontology, at least no more than object oriented programming is ontology. Excel is all about numbers, palantir is all about people (or people-documents). It is simpler than excel and has BigQuery level analytical power behind it, and the human touch to make that interaction go over really well.
I said it's mid because you could do a lot more with just the dataset and queries. You could even possibly do more with command line tools and hoards of data files (minus the OCR and document scanning they do, as well as LLM/NLP). but that isn't accessible and takes a lot more time. Not to mention normalizing, extracting and structuring wildy unstructured data isn't easy. But with BigQ for example, it is done plenty, you just hire a team to do that for you typically.
Their ecosystem is basically google search (including image, reverse image,video,etc..) but much more targeted and oriented towards displaying collated data from hoards of structured and unstructured data (including pdfs, docx,etc..). I would prefer grep, bigquery,splunk myself. but for end users, palantir is unmatched in my experience.
But I'm not selling them here, I'm trying to communicate the power at the disposal of those who use palantir's platforms. Google could have crushed them any time, except even for Google the type of work required was too ghoulish and reputationally risky.
Even with MS copilot(lol), chatgpt, gemini,etc.. running as agents, they're not as simply as palantir's stuff is for searching your data. and you don't have specialists integrating all your data onsite either.
Ultimately, the bigger problem is that even in crowds like HN's, no one seems to have a good idea of what should be done about governments abusing datascience so efficiently. Every answer comes back to red-tapes and regulations, possibly criminal consequence. Are you willing to give up the liberties tech has enjoyed so that future generations can be well, and have shot at peace and prosperity? (ours is too far gone in my opinion)?
China is doing this too, but much more efficiently, much better and at a greater scale. but their society has accepted this, and traded certain liberties for social stability and economic prosperity. The west hasn't done that. lawmakers and the public at large need to be informed by those in tech about these things so informed decisions could be made.
It doesnt matter who does search well, if you understand the implications of the theory of bounded rationality and what claude shannons information theory tells us about bandwith limitations of individual and group cognition.
> Ultimately, the bigger problem is that even in crowds like HN's, no one seems to have a good idea of what should be done about governments abusing datascience so efficiently.
The general-populace/crowd/mob has already lost this game. Govts/Companies (all of them irrespective of ethics/democracy/etc.) are doing what they want with data and datascience. The populace is easily propagandized/distracted from reality and can be easily cocooned.
The only recourse left for the individual is to learn and start playing the game himself. Fortunately the new tools are a great help in this asymmetric warfare. Organizations like EFF/OpenSource/GNU/etc. need to take the lead on this since most people are like sheep when it comes to uses/misuses of technology.
Palantir is just "Cambridge Analytica" redux but with more money/connections/data/breadth/depth/etc. Watch this old presentation by their then ceo Alexander Nix and extrapolate to today's AI world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc
Finally go and read the works of George Orwell, Edward Bernays, Jacques Ellul, Marshall Mcluhan, Noam Chomsky etc. on the whole subject of Propaganda/Manipulation to really understand where we are now.
You can't fight this with tech. The problem is not technological. You don't have the data to fight with either. You could live in an igloo in the arctic with no tech on hand you'll still show up in palantir's hits (unless you were born there and have nothing to trace you back to civilization). Those organizations you mention might help with corporate surveillance capitalism, but not government data mining and surveillance. Palantir is not the same as Cambridge analytica, they're more similar to Microsoft and Google. In simpler terms, they provide the sql db, sql client, and the db admins to manage the data, as well as support to train users. They don't do the analysis and action on objectives for governments, they're not a consultancy firm like cambridge.
Under rule of law, you need laws. Outside of rule of law, well..
You missed the point.
The idea is to protect oneself by using various techniques of deception/reflexive control through stratagems like "poisoning the well", "borrow a knife", "misdirect/misinform" etc. to present different contradictory information/personas/overload-data to "The System" thus obfuscating/masking reality.
You mess-up the raw data and then use reflexive control techniques to allow them to draw inferences from a set that you have predetermined.
Technology, mass commoditized and given easy access to, is central here and should be spearheaded by the organizations i mentioned due to their reputation cachet eg; Tor/Tails/Proxies/Vpns/Secure OSes/Protocols/etc. Simultaneously they should also push for legislation for stricter govt. control over data usage/companies eg. GDPR/etc.
The populace also needs to educate themselves on techniques of Propaganda/Manipulation by reading the works of the authors i mentioned earlier. This will sharpen their critical thinking skills which is a must-have today.
Palantir is very much in the vein of Cambridge Analytica except that they have expanded vastly on its theme and gained "legitimacy". People need to study all about CA and then extrapolate it to today's AI capabilities if they want to understand the shape of things to come.
Some References:
Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA by Edward Jay Epstein; For history/ideas/themes/motivation for further study on a complex subject.
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda:_The_Formation_of_M...
Reflexive Control - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexive_control
Psychographics - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychographics
> many police departments disqualify based on IQ test results measuring too high
This claim is unsupported by publicly available sources AFAICT.
https://www.google.com/search?q=verify+claim+many+police+dep...
The real insight buried in this thread is that Palantir's moat has nothing to do with ontology as a concept - it's that they solved the data integration problem for organizations that are deeply allergic to engineering. Every large org I've worked with has the same issue: dozens of data sources, no consistent schema, and teams that refuse to standardize. Palantir just charges a premium to do the dirty work of normalization and relationship mapping that most internal teams can't get funding or political buy-in for. You could replicate the tech with a graph DB and some ETL pipelines, but good luck getting a government agency to build and maintain that internally.
> isn't X – it's Y
What is this AI slop doing at the top of HN? Come on, you don't even have to click through to know it's slop! It even has an en dash right in the title!
> 2-1. Modeling the Data World with "Nouns" and "Verbs"
> Link type: The relationships between object types, supporting 1-to-1, 1-to-many, and many-to-many relationships.
Seems incredibly naive in terms of symbolic representation of knowledge. Maybe I spent too much time with OWL.
I find myself distinctly unimpressed by the idea that slapping a nice UI and some TS/SCI controls on top of a graph database — the latter being something that NSA did, with considerably more sophistication, years prior in a Neo4J fork — is some kind of brilliant conceptual moat. Graph DBs are useful for certain kinds of problems, which happen to map well to counterterror social mapping strategies, this is nothing particularly new or noteworthy.
Can you say more? What is state of the art?
I've learned this stuff as a hobby, so take it with a grain of salt. I'm not a specialist.
OWL 1, for example, has stuff like transitive properties (the classical example is A ancestorOf B, B ancestorOf C, therefore I can infer A ancestorOf C if I annotate ancestorOf as a transitive property).
Union, equivalence, inversion, symmetries, cardinality. Those are all possible to represent symbolic in OWL ontologies.
They're also neatly separated in different types (OWL Lite, OWL DL, OWL Full). OWL Lite and DL for example are proven to be decidable (you won't get some halt when doing inference, no matter what).
I know there are plenty of database engines to store triples and graphs, and plenty of reasoners out there.
I haven't studied OWL 2 yet or newer stuff like SHACL, but I know it's supposed to be even better.
I worked at a company where the VPs etc spewed the word "ontology" all the time. We were never sure if they knew they were spewing bullshit or they really believed what they were saying was real.
Ontology is one of those fancy words that sounds important but is basically, as another poster pointed out, a standardized vocabulary.
I tried reading but this
[begin]
#### The Paradigm Shift Brought by Palantir: Ontology as an Operational Layer
The *"Ontology"* strategy by Palantir, explained in this book, is a paradigm shift that fundamentally breaks this deep-rooted disease of silos.
In the context of knowledge engineering and the semantic web, the widely cited academic definition of "ontology" is an "explicit specification of a conceptualization" by Gruber (1993).
Furthermore, Studer et al. (1998) expanded on this, proposing the definition of a "formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization."
This transition from "data just for viewing" to "data that directly drives the business" is the key to true digital transformation in the AI era.
[end]
Just gave me brain damage. Please for the love of god just go straight to the point. Just give me the prompts that wrote all of this.
And my secret is epistemology. AMA.
mine is axiology, DNAMA. ;)
well my MA said my DNA is secret.
Palantir is just "Cambridge Analytica" redux but with more money/connections/data/breadth/depth/etc. Their ethical/moral stance i will leave it to you to infer.
Watch these old presentations by CA's then ceo Alexander Nix and extrapolate to today's AI world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bG5ps5KdDo (note the Q/A at the end here)
Also watch this interview with Christopher Wylie the CA whistleblower and again extrapolate to today's AI world - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXdYSQ6nu-M
Be afraid, Be very afraid.
is it accurate ?
It’s just a consulting firm with connections to the Trump administration through Thiel. That’s why they need forward engineers. It’s not a real platform. Ontology is as far as I can tell, a marketing buzzword, mostly repeated by bots to pump Palantir.
Eccentric CEO (we already have Elon another is one too many …) wildly overpriced stock and company and also one without any ethics that’s super close to the Trump admin … I for one am praying this company collapses. I’d love to read a HN post about how they go chapter 11 and leave the public eye.
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