Microsoft has released an open-source tool that helps teams learn ontology design before choosing a knowledge graph platform. It is called Ontology Playground. The project is a fully static React app, which means it does not need a backend, account system, database, or hosted service to run. The goal... is simple: Help people understand what goes inside a graph before they buy or build the graph database. Ontology Playground includes six pre-built domain ontologies: → Retail → Healthcare → Finance → Manufacturing → E-Commerce → Education Each one gives users a starting point for understanding entities, relationships, properties, and how domain knowledge gets structured. The app also includes a live visual designer, structured learning paths, hands-on labs, and RDF/XML export for Fabric IQ. Because it is static, it can be deployed almost anywhere. No backend. No vendor lock-in. No platform commitment upfront. This matters because many teams jump into knowledge graphs too early. They focus on the database first. But the harder question is usually: What should the graph actually know? Ontology Playground teaches that layer first.show more

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It's happening I predict memory systems as an engineering specialty complementary to harness engineering next year

Next year?

Yeah; it'll take time for people to see the distinction between: - harness engineering - general agent memory (second brains), and - ontology/memory as infrastructure, as a proven and distinct specialty Like backend vs frontend vs devops Would you push back?

@thisdudelikesAI I'm fiddling with capturing intent from chats/recorded meetings... Similar to this. And the room intent db to derived spec to compiled output. Seems obvious so assumed a to or product would be doing this, but now I'm just making it for myself to start

@thisdudelikesAI Yep; the category is wide open atm - everyone is presently distracted by the agent layer It's also much harder to get right - the agent layer can be rewritten whenever, the memory layer is harder to change once warm, like the trad database layer Good time to be building

🤭When you reach a place in life where you’re using the word “ontology” in your daily vocabulary… You might want to pause… and take a look at the people actually doing work in the world you live in, and be thankful for them. This is the 2nd time in 2 weeks I’ve had someone suggest something to me where they decided to use an “ontology” as the core concept of their product. Prior to this it only came up in philosophy and theology back in college. For me the word “ontology” = ⚠️🚨 Probably because I have simply used the generic word “system” my entire life to label the exact same thing people are now using “ontology” to label. But hey… people “feel” intelligent if they hear themselves “sound” intelligent. For the most of you who may have never even heard the damn word…

I've seen plenty of these -- mainly with Obsidian. I'm not sure what the use cases are other than impressing other data geeks. I have a Second Brain thing and it creates neat-o node-edge graph diagrams of... stuff. But why?

Microsoft's Ontology Playground ships zero backend, but the hard part was never the graph schema, it was getting domain experts to agree on what a node even means

Wasn’t that what Protege was dioing back in the 2010s?

This Microsoft application feels like it was made back in 2004

An ontology tells an AI what things are. Provenance helps it determine whether it should trust them. Those are two very different problems. As agents move from isolated systems to shared knowledge networks, structure and trust become equally important. That's why ontology design and verifiable knowledge infrastructure should evolve together. @origin_trail

Hpw is it any more than just a graph and why does it have to be a release by microsoft? My EVERY app, no matter how small, has this and a scratch pad in it. I should apparently name it "ontology builder "?

Mum: We have Palantir at home. The Palantir at home:

Lol so they stole Palantir’s playbook? How original. 😂

Welcome to capitalism man

From this, the student gains a solid understanding that Ontology is the academic term for Bubble Diagram. Great. Why bother? Instead, start with either @gdotv_ltd for Apache Tinkerpop or Neo4j Desktop for Neo4j Aura @neo4j and start learning with a real IDE for graph work that is connected with real knowledge bases that hold excellent sample data.

practical static app lets teams prototype ontologies without vendor lock‑in

🤔🤔🤔

i think taxonomies make more sense, all industries already maintain their own taxonomies and they’re easier to traverse for humans or agents

Already built Onthology for the NLA internal AEP 3.0 Agent Control Fabric, working on neuro-symbolic AI agent control system embedded in the fabric now.

Is there one for real estate

Static React apps like this cut friction fast. Seeing an interactive graph without any backend is a nice reminder: the model matters before the engine. Good call on the learning paths

The ontology is the hard part. The platform is just where you store it.

Dog water UI

I might re use this phrase

Good tool for a layer most people skip entirely. Ontology is the blueprint, entity types, properties, relationship rules, before any real data goes in. Knowledge graph is what you get once that blueprint gets populated. Building The Curator taught me this tradeoff firsthand. Formal ontologies like this give you validation and interoperability, RDF export, works with any semantic tool, but they demand real upfront design work before you can use anything. My approach trades some of that rigor for zero setup, the structure emerges as you feed it content instead of requiring you to declare it first. Different problems, same underlying idea.

Nice!

LikeC4 ( - Architecture-as-Code DSL for C4 diagrams, git-versioned, AI-friendly (MCP) Ontology Playground - interactive ontology/RDF graphs + NLP query. Both show relations, different purpose: architecture vs knowledge modeling. More differences? 👀

yet another network graph render?

how is this different to what Obsidian is already doing? what am I missing here. @grok

might look into this

That's the most vibecoded UI I may have ever seen

Cool. But be aware of the noun-trap

I hope they use it to fix the 14 layer of management

Damn, Microsoft still in ‘95 huh.

Finally, a tool for thinking before building.

Try 🤙🏻

Wtf is ontology

Know what the graph should know before you buy the database. Most teams I work with still do this backwards. About time.

static react for this is smart. zero friction to sketch a model before you lock into a graph db

Learning the ontology before the database is smart sequencing