What’s the difference between context engineering and ontology engineering?
What’s the difference between context engineering and ontology engineering?
We hear a lot about “context engineering” these days in AI wonderland. A lot of good thing are being said but it’s worth noting what’s missing.
Yes, context matters. But context without structure is narrative, not knowledge. And if AI is going to scale beyond demos and copilots into systems that reason, track memory, and interoperate across domains… then context alone isn’t enough.
We need ontology engineering.
Here’s the difference:
- Context engineering is about curating inputs: prompts, memory, user instructions, embeddings. It’s the art of framing.
- Ontology engineering is about modeling the world: defining entities, relations, axioms, and constraints that make reasoning possible.
In other words:
Context guides attention. Ontology shapes understanding.
What’s dangerous is that many teams stop at context, assuming that if you feed the right words to an LLM, you’ll get truth, traceability, or decisions you can trust. This is what I call “hallucination of control”.
Ontologies provide what LLMs lack: grounding, consistency, and interoperability, but they are hard to build without the right methods, adapted from the original discipline that started 20+ years ago with the semantic web, now it’s time to work it out for the LLM AI era.
If you’re serious about scaling AI across business processes or mission-critical systems, the real challenge is more than context, it’s shared meaning. And tech alone cannot solve this.
That’s why we need put ontology discussion in the board room, because integrating AI into organizations is much more complicated than just providing the right context in a prompt or a context window.
That’s it for today. More tomorrow!
I’m trying to get back at journaling here every day. 🤙 hope you will find something useful in what I write. | 71 comments on LinkedIn
What’s the difference between context engineering and ontology engineering?