𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙙𝙖𝙮: I've been mulling over how both OWL and SHACL can be employed during the decision-making phase for AI Agents when using a knowledge graph instead of relying on an LLM that hallucinates. In this way, the LLM can still be used for assessment and sensory feedback, but it augments the graph, not the other way around. OWL and SHACL serve different roles. SHACL is not just a preprocessing validator; it can play an active role in constraining, guiding, or triggering decisions, especially when integrated into AI pipelines. However, OWL is typically more central to inferencing and reasoning tasks. SHACL can actively participate in decision-making, especially when decisions require data integrity, constraint enforcement, or trigger-based logic. In complex agents, OWL provides the inferencing engine, while SHACL acts as the constraint gatekeeper and occasionally contributes to rule-based decision-making. For example, an AI agent processes RDF data describing an applicant's skills, degree, and experience. SHACL validates the data's structure, ensuring required fields are present and correctly formatted. OWL reasoning infers that the applicant is qualified for a technical role and matches the profile of a backend developer. SHACL is then used again to check policy compliance. With all checks passed, the applicant is shortlisted, and a follow-up email is triggered. In AI agent decision-making, OWL and SHACL often work together in complementary ways. SHACL is commonly used as a preprocessing step to validate incoming RDF data. If the data fails validation, it's flagged or excluded, ensuring only clean, structurally sound data reaches the OWL reasoner. In this role, SHACL acts as a gatekeeper. They can also operate in parallel or in an interleaved manner within a pipeline. As decisions evolve, SHACL shapes may be checked mid-process. Some AI agents even use SHACL as a rule engine—to trigger alerts, detect actionable patterns, or constrain reasoning paths—while OWL continues to handle more complex semantic inferences, such as class hierarchies or property logic. Finally, SHACL can augment decision-making by confirming whether OWL-inferred actions comply with specific constraints. OWL may infer that “A is a type of B, so do X,” and SHACL then determines whether doing X adheres to a policy or requirement. Because SHACL supports closed-world assumptions (which OWL does not), it plays a valuable role in enforcing policies or compliance rules during decision execution. Illustrated:

When people discuss how LLMS "reason," you’ll often hear that they rely on transduction rather than abduction. It sounds technical, but the distinction matters - especially as we start wiring LLMs into systems that are supposed to think. 🔵 Transduction is case-to-case reasoning. It doesn’t build theories; it draws fuzzy connections based on resemblance. Think: “This metal conducts electricity, and that one looks similar - so maybe it does too.” 🔵 Abduction, by contrast, is about generating explanations. It’s what scientists (and detectives) do: “This metal is conducting - maybe it contains free electrons. That would explain it.” The claim is that LLMs operate more like transducers - navigating high-dimensional spaces of statistical similarity, rather than forming crisp generalisations. But this isn’t the whole picture. In practice, it seems to me that LLMs also perform a kind of induction - abstracting general patterns from oceans of text. They learn the shape of ideas and apply them in novel ways. That’s closer to “All metals of this type have conducted in the past, so this one probably will.” Now add tools to the mix - code execution, web search, Elon Musk's tweet history 😉 - and LLMs start doing something even more interesting: program search and synthesis. It's messy, probabilistic, and not at all principled or rigorous. But it’s inching toward a form of abductive reasoning. Which brings us to a more principled approach for reasoning within an enterprise domain: the neuro-symbolic loop - a collaboration between large language models and knowledge graphs. The graph provides structure: formal semantics, ontologies, logic, and depth. The LLM brings intuition: flexible inference, linguistic creativity, and breadth. One grounds. The other leaps. 💡 The real breakthrough could come when the grounding isn’t just factual, but conceptual - when the ontology encodes clean, meaningful generalisations. That’s when the LLM’s leaps wouldn’t just reach further - they’d rise higher, landing on novel ideas that hold up under formal scrutiny. 💡 So where do metals fit into this new framing? 🔵 Transduction: “This metal conducts. That one looks the same - it probably does too.” 🔵 Induction: “I’ve tested ten of these. All conducted. It’s probably a rule.” 🔵 Abduction: “This metal is conducting. It shares properties with the ‘conductive alloy’ class - especially composition and crystal structure. The best explanation is a sea of free electrons.” LLMs, in isolation, are limited in their ability to perform structured abduction. But when embedded in a system that includes a formal ontology, logical reasoning, and external tools, they can begin to participate in richer forms of reasoning. These hybrid systems are still far from principled scientific reasoners - but they hint at a path forward: a more integrated and disciplined neuro-symbolic architecture that moves beyond mere pattern completion.

🚀 When I shared our 2025 goals for the Enterprise Data Organization, one of the things I alluded to was machine-readable column-level metadata. Let’s unpack what that means—and why it matters. 🔍 What: For datasets we deliver via modern cloud distribution, we now provide human - and machine - readable metadata at the column level. Each column has an immutable URL (no auth, no CAPTCHA) that hosts name/value metadata - synonyms, units of measure, descriptions, and more - in multiple human languages. It’s semantic context that goes far beyond what a traditional data dictionary can convey. We can't embed it, so we link to it. 💡 Why: Metadata is foundational to agentic, precise consumption of structured data. Our customers are investing in semantic layers, data catalogs, and knowledge graphs - and they shouldn’t have to copy-paste from a PDF to get there. Use curl, Python, Bash - whatever works - to automate ingestion. (We support content negotiation and conditional GETs.) 🧠 Under the hood? It’s RDF. Love it or hate it, you don’t need to engage with the plumbing unless you want to. ✨ To our knowledge, this hasn’t been done before. This is our MVP. We’re putting it out there to learn what works - and what doesn’t. It’s vendor-neutral, web-based, and designed to scale across: 📊 Breadth of datasets across S&P 🧬 Depth of metadata 🔗 Choice of linking venue 🙏 It took a village to make this happen. I can’t name everyone without writing a book, but I want to thank our executive leadership for the trust and support to go build this. Let us know what you think! 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gbe3NApH Martina Cheung, Saugata Saha, Swamy Kocherlakota, Dave Ernsberger, Mark Eramo, Frank Tarsillo, Warren Breakstone, Hamish B., Erica Robeen, Laura Miller, Justine S Iverson, | 17 comments on LinkedIn

Part 6 of 6 in the series “LLMs Need Knowledge Graphs. Use RDF or End Up Rebuilding It.”

I've been working on autonomous AI systems, and wanted to share some thoughts on what I believe makes them effective. The challenge isn't just making AI that follows instructions well, but creating systems that can reason, and act independently.

LLMs already contain overlapping world models. You just have to ask them right. Ontologists reply to an LLM output, “That’s not a real ontology—it’s not a formal conceptualization.” But that’s just the No True Scotsman fallacy dressed up in OWL. Boring. Not growth-oriented. Look forward, angel. A foundation model is a compression of human knowledge. The real problem isn't that we "lack a conceptualization". The real problem with an FM is that they contain too many. FMs contain conceptualizations—plural. Messy? Sure. But usable. At Stardog, we’re turning this latent structure into real ontologies using symbolic knowledge distillation. Prompt orchestration → structure extraction → formal encoding. OWL, SHACL, and friends. Shake till mixed. Rinse. Repeat. Secret sauce simmered and reduced. This isn't theoretical hard. We avoid that. It’s merely engineering hard. We LTF into that! But the payoff means bootstrapping rich, new ontologies at scale: faster, cheaper, with lineage. It's the intersection of FM latent space, formal ontology, and user intent expressed via CQs. We call it the Symbolic Latent Layer (SLL). Cute eh? The future of enterprise AI isn’t just documents. It’s distilling structured symbolic knowledge from LLMs and plugging it into agents, workflows, and reasoning engines. You don’t need a priesthood to get a formal ontology anymore. You need a good prompt and a smarter pipeline and the right EKG platform. There's a lot more to say about this so I said it at Stardog Labs https://lnkd.in/eY5Sibed | 17 comments on LinkedIn

In this position paper "Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Symbolic AI: The Path to Interpretable Hybrid AI Systems in Medicine" my L3S Research Center and TIB – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Technik und Naturwissenschaften und Universitätsbibliothek colleagues around Maria-Esther Vidal have nicely laid out some research challenges on the way to interpretable hybrid AI systems in medicine. However, I think the conceptual framework is broadly applicable way beyond medicine. For example, my former colleagues and PhD students at eccenca are working on operationalizing Neuro-Symbolic AI for Enterprise Knowledge Management with eccenca's Corporate Memory. The paper outlines a compelling architecture for combining sub-symbolic models (e.g., deep learning) with symbolic reasoning systems to enable AI that is interpretable, robust, and aligned with human values. eccenca implements these principles at scale through its neuro-symbolic Enterprise Knowledge Graph platform, Corporate Memory for real-world industrial settings: 1. Symbolic Foundation via Semantic Web Standards - Corporate Memory is grounded in W3C standards (RDF, RDFS, OWL, SHACL, SPARQL), enabling formal knowledge representation, inferencing, and constraint validation. This allows to encode domain ontologies, business rules, and data governance policies in a machine-interpretable and human-verifiable manner. 2. Integration of Sub-symbolic Components - it integrates LLMs and ML models for tasks such as schema matching, natural language interpretation, entity resolution, and ontology population. These are linked to the symbolic layer via mappings and annotations, ensuring traceability and explainability. 3. Neuro-Symbolic Interfaces for Hybrid Reasoning - Hybrid workflows where symbolic constraints (e.g., SHACL shapes) guide LLM-based data enrichment. LLMs suggest schema alignments, which are verified against ontological axioms. Graph embeddings and path-based querying power semantic search and similarity. 4. Human-in-the-loop Interactions - Domain experts interact through low-code interfaces and semantic UIs that allow inspection, validation, and refinement of both the symbolic and neural outputs, promoting human oversight and continuous improvement. Such an approach can power Industrial Applications, e.g. in digital thread integration in manufacturing, compliance automation in pharma and finance and in general, cross-domain interoperability in data mesh architectures. Corporate Memory is a practical instantiation of neuro-symbolic AI that meets industrial-grade requirements for governance, scalability, and explainability – key tenets of Human-Centric AI. Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/evyarUsR #NeuroSymbolicAI #HumanCentricAI #KnowledgeGraphs #EnterpriseArchitecture #ExplainableAI #SemanticWeb #LinkedData #LLM #eccenca #CorporateMemory #OntologyDrivenAI #AI4Industry

Semantic technology and AI are revolutionizing how we find information online: content creation, SEO, reshaping user discovery in the digital world.

Want to Fix LLM Hallucination? Neurosymbolic Alone Won’t Cut It The Conversation’s new piece makes a clear case for neurosymbolic AI—integrating symbolic logic with statistical learning—as the long-term fix for LLM hallucinations. It’s a timely and necessary argument: “No matter how large a language model gets, it can’t escape its fundamental lack of grounding in rules, logic, or real-world structure. Hallucination isn’t a bug, it’s the default.” But what’s crucial—and often glossed over—is that symbolic logic alone isn’t enough. The real leap comes from adding formal ontologies and semantic constraints that make meaning machine-computable. OWL, Shapes Constraint Language (SHACL), and frameworks like BFO, Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE), the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO), and the Common Core Ontologies (CCO) don’t just “represent rules”—they define what exists, what can relate, and under what conditions inference is valid. That’s the difference between “decorating” a knowledge graph and engineering one that can detect, explain, and prevent hallucinations in practice. I’d go further: • Most enterprise LLM hallucinations are just semantic errors—mislabeling, misattribution, or class confusion that only formal ontologies can prevent. • Neurosymbolic systems only deliver if their symbolic half is grounded in ontological reality, not just handcrafted rules or taxonomies. The upshot: We need to move beyond mere integration of symbols and neurons. We need semantic scaffolding—ontologies as infrastructure—to ensure AI isn’t just fluent, but actually right. Curious if others are layering formal ontologies (BFO, DOLCE, SUMO) into their AI stacks yet? Or are we still hoping that more compute and prompt engineering will do the trick? #NeuroSymbolicAI #SemanticAI #Ontology #LLMs #AIHallucination #KnowledgeGraphs #AITrust #AIReasoning

I'm happy to share the draft of the "Semantically Composable Architectures" mini-paper. It is the culmination of approximately four years' work, which began with Coreless Architectures and has now evolved into something much bigger. LLMs are impressive, but a real breakthrough will occur once we surpass the cognitive capabilities of a single human brain. Enabling autonomous large-scale system reverse engineering and large-scale autonomous transformation with minimal to no human involvement, while still making it understandable to humans if they choose to, is a central pillar of making truly groundbreaking changes. We hope the ideas we shared will be beneficial to humanity and advance our civilization further. It is not final and will require some clarification and improvements, but the key concepts are present. Happy to hear your thoughts and feedback. Some of these concepts underpin the design of the Product X system. Part of the core team + external contribution: Andrew Barsukov Andrey Kolodnitsky Sapta Girisa N Keith E. Glendon Gurpreet Sachdeva Saurav Chandra Mike Diachenko Oleh Sinkevych | 13 comments on LinkedIn

The number of published scholarly articles is growing at a significant rate, making scholarly knowledge organization increasingly important. Various approaches have been proposed to organize...

𝙏𝙝𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝘿𝙖𝙮: What if we could encapsulate everything a person knows—their entire bubble of knowledge, what I’d call a Personal Knowledge Domain or better, our 𝙎𝙚𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙘 𝙎𝙚𝙡𝙛, and represent it in an RDF graph? From that foundation, we could create Personal Agents that act on our behalf. Each of us would own our agent, with the ability to share or lease it for collaboration with other agents. If we could make these agents secure, continuously updatable, and interoperable, what kind of power might we unlock for the human race? Is this idea so far-fetched? It has solid grounding in knowledge representation, identity theory, and agent-based systems. It fits right in with current trends: AI assistants, the semantic web, Web3 identity, and digital twins. Yes, the technical and ethical hurdles are significant, but this could become the backbone of a future architecture for personalized AI and cooperative knowledge ecosystems. Pieces of the puzzle already exist: Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid Project, digital twins for individuals, Personal AI platforms like personal.ai, Retrieval-Augmented Language Model agents (ReALM), and Web3 identity efforts such as SpruceID, architectures such as MCP and inter-agent protocols such as A2A. We see movement in human-centric knowledge graphs like FOAF and SIOC, learning analytics, personal learning environments, and LLM-graph hybrids. What we still need is a unified architecture that: * Employs RDF or similar for semantic richness * Ensures user ownership and true portability * Enables secure agent-to-agent collaboration * Supports continuous updates and trust mechanisms * Integrates with LLMs for natural, contextual reasoning These are certainly not novel notions, for example: * MyPDDL (My Personal Digital Life) and the PDS (Personal Data Store) concept from MIT and the EU’s DECODE project. * The Human-Centric AI Group at Stanford and the Augmented Social Cognition group at PARC have also published research around lifelong personal agents and social memory systems. However, one wonders if anyone is working on combining all of the ingredients into a fully baked cake - after which we can enjoy dessert while our personal agents do our bidding. | 21 comments on LinkedIn

The new AI powered Anayltics stack is here…says Gartner’s Afraz Jaffri ! A key element of that stack is an ontology powered Semantic Layer that serves as the brain for AI agents to act on knowledge of your internal data and deliver timely, accurate and hallucination-free insights! #semanticlayer #knowledgegraphs #genai #decisionintelligence

Last week I was fortunate to attend the Knowledge Graph Conference in NYC! Here are a few trends that span multiple presentations and conversations. - AI and LLM Integration: A major focus [again this year] was how LLMs can be used to enrich knowledge graphs and how knowledge graphs, in turn, can improve LLM outputs. This included using LLMs for entity extraction, verification, inference, and query generation. Many presentations demonstrated how grounding LLMs in knowledge graphs leads to more accurate, contextual, and explainable AI responses. - Semantic Layers and Enterprise Knowledge: There was a strong emphasis on building semantic layers that act as gateways to structured, connected enterprise data. These layers facilitate data integration, governance, and more intelligent AI agents. Decentralized semantic data products (DPROD) were discussed as a framework for internal enterprise data ecosystems. - From Data to Knowledge: Many speakers highlighted that AI is just the “tip of the iceberg” and the true power lies in the data beneath. Converting raw data into structured, connected knowledge was seen as crucial. The hidden costs of ignoring semantics were also discussed, emphasizing the need for consistent data preparation, cleansing, and governance. - Ontology Management and Change: Managing changes and governance in ontologies was a recurring theme. Strategies such as modularization, version control, and semantic testing were recommended. The concept of “SemOps” (Semantic Operations) was discussed, paralleling DevOps for software development. - Practical Tools and Demos: The conference included numerous demos of tools and platforms for building, querying, and visualizing knowledge graphs. These ranged from embedded databases like KuzuDB and RDFox to conversational AI interfaces for KGs, such as those from Metaphacts and Stardog. I especially enjoyed catching up with the Semantic Arts team (Mark Wallace, Dave McComb and Steve Case), talking Gist Ontology and SemOps. I also appreciated the detailed Neptune Q&A I had with Brian O'Keefe, the vision of Ora Lassila and then a chance meeting Adrian Gschwend for the first time, where we connected on LinkML and Elmo as a means to help with bidirectional dataflows. I was so excited by these conversations that I planned to have two team members join me in June at the Data Centric Architecture Workshop Forum, https://www.dcaforum.com/

In a previous post I was touching on how ontologies are foundational to many data activities, yet "obscure". As a consequence, the different roles of ontologies are not always known among people that make use of them, as they may focus only on some of the aspects relevant for specific use cases.

It seems the answer on whether an LMM would be able to replace the whole text-to-ontology pipeline is a resounding ‘no’. If you’re one of those who think that should be (or even is?) a ‘yes’: why, and did you do the experiments that show it’s as good as the alternatives (with the results available)? And I mean a proper ontology, not a knowledge graph with numerous duplications and contradictions and lacking constraints. For a few gentle considerations (and pointers to longer arguments) and a summary figure of processes the LLM supposedly would be replacing: see https://lnkd.in/dG_Xsv_6 | 43 comments on LinkedIn

In the last few weeks, I’ve been diving into the world of #AgenticAI, and I found quite a mess with definitions, which creates a lot of misunderstanding… | 13 comments on LinkedIn

I'm coming around to the idea of ontologies. My experience with entity extraction with LLMs has been inconsistent at best. Even running the same request with… | 63 comments on LinkedIn

Can Ontologies be seen as General Ledger for AI? Could that be a good way to audit AI systems delivering critical business outcomes? In my quest to develop a… | 69 comments on LinkedIn

i want to share the actual steps we’re using to generate text to sql through an ontology instead of an LLM [explained with a library analogy]: 𝟭… | 15 comments on LinkedIn

Technical communicators: understand these AI skills to form your new portfolio: terminology management, taxonomy, ontology, semantic layer, knowledge graph and knowledge management in general

Symbolica's groundbreaking AI approach using advanced math promises human-like reasoning, unparalleled transparency, and efficiency in a fraction of the data.

Have you tried Croissant? If not, you are missing out. Using LLMs to generate knowledge graphs is an exciting area of exploration. My colleague Jesús Barrasa…

Recent work demonstrated great promise in the idea of orchestrating collaborations between LLMs, human input, and various tools to address the inherent limitations of LLMs. We propose a novel perspective called semantic decoding, which frames these collaborative processes as optimization procedures in semantic space. Specifically, we conceptualize LLMs as semantic processors that manipulate meaningful pieces of information that we call semantic tokens (known thoughts). LLMs are among a large pool of other semantic processors, including humans and tools, such as search engines or code executors. Collectively, semantic processors engage in dynamic exchanges of semantic tokens to progressively construct high-utility outputs. We refer to these orchestrated interactions among semantic processors, optimizing and searching in semantic space, as semantic decoding algorithms. This concept draws a direct parallel to the well-studied problem of syntactic decoding, which involves crafting algorithms to best exploit auto-regressive language models for extracting high-utility sequences of syntactic tokens. By focusing on the semantic level and disregarding syntactic details, we gain a fresh perspective on the engineering of AI systems, enabling us to imagine systems with much greater complexity and capabilities. In this position paper, we formalize the transition from syntactic to semantic tokens as well as the analogy between syntactic and semantic decoding. Subsequently, we explore the possibilities of optimizing within the space of semantic tokens via semantic decoding algorithms. We conclude with a list of research opportunities and questions arising from this fresh perspective. The semantic decoding perspective offers a powerful abstraction for search and optimization directly in the space of meaningful concepts, with semantic tokens as the fundamental units of a new type of computation.

A word of caution from Netflix against blindly using cosine similarity as a measure of semantic similarity: https://lnkd.in/gX3tR4YK They study linear matrix… | 12 comments on LinkedIn