In this blog post, we’ll explore the importance of establishing policies and frameworks that govern the creation and management of ontologies within your organization. We also look at how metaphactory’s ontology management helps to facilitate proper governance.
A guide to ontology governance in metaphactory
So, you’ve found the perfect tool (metaphactory!) to build an ontology for your enterprise-wide semantic knowledge graph—great! Before you even begin creating new ontologies or reusing existing ones, it’s important to first consider what protocols need to be in place for this to be a seamless and sustainable process for those interacting with and building upon your ontology, and as your organization’s data needs evolve over time.
While these ‘processes’ can sound limiting, having a set of guidelines on how to best manage your ontologies will help you and your team create, manage, edit, review and publish ontologies and related assets with ease, transparency and better collaboration overall.
In this article, we explain what ontology governance entails and why it’s essential for your enterprise-wide knowledge graph journey. We will also explore the functionalities provided by metaphactory’s ontology editor that help administer these policies and how you can make the most of these tools.
Table of contents
What is ontology governance?
In a previous blog post, we defined ontologies as:
Semantic knowledge models that define the types of entities that exist in a domain and the properties that can be used to describe them. An ontology combines a representation, formal naming, and definition of the elements (such as classes, attributes, and relations) that define the domain of discourse. You may think of it as the logical graph model that defines what types (sets) of entities exist, their shared attributes, and logical relations.
We often use the term “ontology” interchangeably with ‘semantic knowledge models’ or ‘semantic data models’, as they are at the heart of the semantic knowledge graph. This harmonization of data through the semantic model can transform the data captured in knowledge graphs into knowledge by offering a layer of description and metadata that contextualizes individual data points, thereby enabling users to glean meaning and advanced insights from it.
By formally defining a structured representation of knowledge within a domain using an ontology, you can establish a shared and consistent understanding of the concepts and terminology within that domain that all members of the organization – and even machines – can understand. This helps users surface hidden relations and derive valuable insights from the data which can then be used to power intelligent applications or inform business strategies and decision-making.
Definition: ontology governance
Ontology governance refers to the formalized processes, policies, and frameworks that guide the creation, management, evolution, and use of ontologies within an organization. It ensures that ontologies are developed and maintained consistently across departments and that all contributors adhere to a standard, repeatable procedure.
Proper governance considers all parts of ontology management and involves having a set of guidelines for ontology provenance, defining ownership, roles and permission, workflows and adhering to standards and shared best practices. While the specifics of these guidelines will vary from each organization (such as how many rounds of review your ontology will go through or how to communicate about revisions), we’ll go through each of these elements in detail below and describe how metaphactory’s ontology editor can support each aspect of ontology governance.
Why is ontology governance important?
A need for some form of governance naturally emerges when there is a growing set of ontologies, applications or end users — but any organization of any size dealing with ontologies should already consider how it should be governed from the onset. Defining these items earlier on ensures that end users or consumers import/export, manage, review and edit their ontologies in a manner that is consistent and compliant with organizational requirements. It also prevents the communication issues and redundancies that often arise when there’s a lack of clarity.
Quality
Implementing governance introduces standardization that ensures the quality of your ontologies in various dimensions—from metadata completeness to correctness in formal ontology language, consistent naming conventions and more. Defining something as granular as the ontology naming convention to be in lowercase or camelcase, for example, ensures that even if numerous users are contributing to an ontology, you know that the data models follow a certain quality standard.
Scalability
Governance naturally supports the growth and evolution of an organization's data infrastructure by providing a scalable framework for managing both the increase in data volume and users and stakeholders involved.
Collaboration
Facilitates better collaboration and communication, reducing any miscommunication or delays by following transparent processes.
Compliance and security
Creating a policy for access and permissions helps meet enterprise compliance and security requirements.
It seems intuitive that every organization would have some sort of governance policy in place, but many organizations lack the tools to actually streamline and support this process.
Ontology governance in metaphactory
metaphactory is an enterprise-wide knowledge graph platform that helps organizations transform data into contextual, actionable knowledge. One of the ways that it does this is through semantic knowledge modeling, which is the act of building an ontology (or again, we also refer to them as semantic knowledge models) and formally representing data to create a shared understanding of concepts within a specific domain. By classifying and organizing data in a model, you create a standardized format that is both human and machine-interpretable.
Governance is essential for modeling, since the process of modeling in itself must be collaborative in order for it to be efficient and result in meaningful models. To support modeling’s inherently collaborative nature and avoid communication chaos, some form of governance is required. metaphactory offers the tooling to implement your governance framework and make collaboration more efficient and seamless.
Within the metaphactory system, you are able to collaboratively create and review ontologies and manage them in a lifecycle. There are functions that provide a clear status of ontology and measures to move the ontology through different states, as well as create new versions. You can make clear what is currently in development, in review or published, and are able to easily create a new version without losing the previous version.
Here’s how you can govern your ontologies in metaphactory. We’ll cover all of the features so you know what they are and can make the best use of them.
Ontology provenance
Ontology provenance refers to the detailed documentation of an ontology’s creation, history and changes, which are made available in the ontology editor. This includes information such as when an ontology (or any element such as class, attribute, relations within an ontology, etc.) was created, last modified and by whom. The documentation and traceability of this information helps to preserve the quality of the ontology and makes it easier to manage when multiple stakeholders are involved, or if the volume of ontologies grows. Any modification made to an ontology can be traced back to the person who made the edit so that any questions or concerns can be quickly addressed to the right person. This clarity also helps contributors working on the ontology know exactly where it is in the lifecycle.
Editorial workflows & asset life cycle
Even non-technical and business workers can contribute to the knowledge model without having any previous knowledge about modeling because of metaphactory’s intuitive and user-friendly interface, which is especially useful when capturing knowledge that perhaps only these domain experts know of. The editorial workflow in metaphactory makes it even easier to collaborate with multiple contributors because it offers functionalities that allow users to explicitly change the status of an ontology (from ‘In development to ‘In review’, etc.) lock or unlock an ontology for review, and communicate with other users about the changes or provide feedback about the current status. For example, these are the statuses supported in metaphactory out-of-the-box:
In development: the ontology is in active development.
In review: the ontology is being reviewed by other Knowledge Graph Engineers and Knowledge Stewards (subject matter experts).
Ready to be published: (optional) reviews are completed and the ontology has been marked as ready to be published.
Published: the ontology has been published.
Archived: the ontology has been replaced by a newer version of the same ontology, but is still available in the system for reference (e.g. to not break dependencies).
For example, if you have completed your edit of an ontology and would like it to be reviewed by other colleagues, you would save your edits and go to the ontology dashboard, then select ‘Start review request’ and assign it to a specific reviewer. At this point, it will go into a ‘locked state’ where no more changes can be made to the ontology until the status is once again changed.
You can change the access permissions of the ontology in different states to preserve each version and eliminate any confusion or accidental edits while it is being reviewed.
Once in the review stage, your colleagues can then leave comments and begin a discussion about any concerns or feedback about the ontology. Once all parties are satisfied with the changes, the colleague responsible for reviewing/approving the ontology can change the status to ‘Ready to be published’. This is an optional step that can be useful if you want to notify others about the final version or need to wait for resources before publishing. The ontology can remain in this state for as long as necessary.
You may also want to publish immediately. If so, the published version is also saved to Git, ensuring there is a stored copy. This way, even if the graph database is wiped, disappears, or someone modifies it manually, you have a secure master copy and full integrity through a hashed versioning system. It can also trigger additional processes in other systems, such as ones where the ontology will be used.
If you would like to modify an ontology after publishing it, you cannot change the existing version directly, instead, you have to create and modify a new version. Again, this ensures you have a saved copy and a traceable history of the ontology in case you’d like to go back and review or revive an earlier version.
The editorial workflows facilitate the smooth movement of the ontology through its lifecycle by offering clear labels that display the state in which the ontology is in the lifecycle. Displaying the status of an ontology makes the workflow process more transparent and guides the users through each step. Additionally, elements such as access and permissions can be managed effectively to ensure that only authorized users can make changes.
Roles & permissions
In addition to being able to see who created or last modified an ontology, managing roles and permissions to ontologies is also an important part of ontology governance. This helps to enforce security and ensures that only permitted people are able to view, edit or create an ontology. As well, it enables accountability and traceability should there be any questions about an ontology.
While these permission rules seem like they can slow down an ontology’s movement through the review cycle, they are crucial for protecting against unauthorized access. Without them, an unauthorized user could accidentally modify or delete an ontology, which would derail the entire project and require you to start over—taking up more time and effort than originally planned.
metaphactory supports two roles that are specific to ontologies and vocabularies and can be assigned per individual user and per individual asset:
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Owners – Users who have permission to delete, publish or initiate a new version of an ontology or a vocabulary
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Authors – Users who have permission to edit an ontology or a vocabulary that is in development
Having roles assigned also enables the notification functionality, so that users are notified when they receive comments or are required to review or approve an ontology, for example, thus enhancing the transparency and communication around asset management.
Benefits of metaphactory’s ontology editor
The benefits of utilizing metaphactory’s ontology editor with respect to ontology governance are two-fold: on the enterprise level and the individual user level.
Benefits for the enterprise
Enterprises with multiple departments and domains will benefit from having these defined policies as their ontologies continue to grow, but also as they strive to transition towards a knowledge-centric culture, where knowledge needs to be at the foundation of all business decisions and, therefore, knowledge modeling becomes a core task that needs to be scalable and embed all relevant knowledge workers.
They will be able to:
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Effortlessly ensure compliance with external and internal ontology standards, as well as compliance with regulatory guidelines
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Easily manage permissions to edit, publish or delete ontologies as users and roles grow in number
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Maintain integrity of data mapped to ontologies through explicit change and version management of ontologies
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Engage multiple stakeholders – who may or may not have technical expertise, through intuitive interfaces
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Integrate with existing processes and systems, for example, through the Git integration or metaphactory’s new event bus
Benefits for the user
On the user level, adhering to governance standards helps the ease of day-to-day operations by:
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Improving collaboration among multiple contributors and stakeholders through notifications, role assignments and in-platform conversations—no media breaks or having to communicate in other channels
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Enhancing transparency of information about the ontology such as its status, any opinions or feedback, as ontology development is an iterative process
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Offering clarity about next actions and expectations, including how tasks should be executed and who is responsible
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Benefiting from explicit change view and management, i.e., sometimes it helps to see changes explicitly or being able to roll back to a previous development state
Future outlook
We will continue developing the existing features offered in metaphactory’s ontology editor, while working on introducing new functionalities such as push notifications for comments, review requests or changes made to the ontology, and a status dashboard for quality control over all ontologies. Keep an eye out for our future releases.
In another blog post, we’re going to cover best practices for ontology governance in metaphactory with a step-by-step demo of the metaphactory system - stay tuned!
Try it for yourself
Do you already have a governance plan for your ontologies in place? Or are you curious about semantic knowledge modeling with metaphactory?
metaphactory is an industry-leading enterprise knowledge graph platform transforming data into consumable, contextual and actionable knowledge.
Our low-code, FAIR Data platform simplifies capturing and organizing domain expertise in explicit semantic models, extracting insights from your data and sharing knowledge across the enterprise.
metaphactory includes innovative features and tools for:
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Semantic knowledge modeling — explicitly capture knowledge & domain expertise in a semantic model & manage knowledge graph assets such as ontologies, vocabularies and data catalogs
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Low-code application building — build easy-to-configure applications that fit your enterprise and use-case requirements using a low-code, model-driven approach
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End-user oriented interaction — users of any level of technical experience can interact with your data through a user-friendly interface that includes semantic search, visualization, discovery & exploration and authoring
