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by leeuw01
1735 days ago
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Any word from the wise for those who want to get into ontologies? Furthermore, do you know about any good resources regarding the process of capturing information into models? I've found books about solutions like Ecore & OWL, but I fail to find books about the practice of modelling in general. |
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1. Most people don't understand the importance of ontologies. It is an uphill battle to convince them. Build your ontologies quietly. They are a superpower.
2. A real ontology must extend far beyond the confines of the data store. You must think of it as also including the workers that bring data into the ontology, the workers which verify the consistency of the ontology, and the query engines through which users get data out of the ontology.
3. Start simple. Your ontologies should be as dumb as possible to start out with but they should support extension.
4. Learn one datastore really well and build your ontologies there. Chances are you don't need to know anything about OWL or neo4j or Spark or anything hyped. I use Postgres.
5. Idempotency is very important. This means, for example, that if you run a data collection worker twice with the same arguments, it should not create duplicate data in your ontology.
6. Build for a specific use case. Don't try to build a general purpose ontology. The kind of data you will be storing and the access patterns will determine a lot about the structure of your ontology and you should be accounting for these things.
7. Avoid event-drive architectures (e.g. IFTTT, AWS Lambda, etc.). Put your faith in idempotence and cron (actually, I use systemd but you get the picture).
Do you have an idea what kind of information you would want to build an ontology for?