The Opinionated Ontologist

The Ship of Theseus isn’t just a puzzle. It’s a mirror. It reflects back at us all the quiet assumptions we carry about identity, permanence, and change. And in ontology, those assumptions become encoded—solidified into the logic of systems that influence research, healthcare, policy, and more.
Today we’re standing at the river's edge - talking about identity, transformation, and what makes a thing that very thing — from ships to cells to the heart inside your chest. Let’s dive into the philosophical and practical questions of realism, identity over time, and the frameworks we use to describe the world.
Keep in touch over on our patreon channel, where you can bring us your ontological opinions for discussion.

It's been another activating week in the AI doomer news cycle and our friends have been asking us - what's our take? So here it is - our first (O,O) nanopublication, where Jamie and Braeden take a beat to respond to the AI-pocalypse hype and ease us all into a grounded conversation about governance, best practice, open vs. closed models, and the business models that are stoking the frenzy.
01:00 Unpacking the gap between AI doom and reality
04:15 The "bad dog" vs. "the leash" approach to AI safety
10:35 Looking at the structure of the AI market
14:08 OpenAI's "marketing costs"
19:00 Using smaller, open models
23:54 How Jamie uses AI
28:12 What governance looks like
31:54 What does accountability look like
33:36 Making time to ask hard questions
36:00 What will happen to closed-model markets

Connect with us on LinkedIn and let us know what you think. You can bring us your AI and ontology engineering questions for us answer on-air, over on our Patreon. In the meantime, we'll see you in the concept map!

Welcome back to the concept map! It's the start of Season 2 of The Opinionated Ontologist and we're featuring a conversation Jamie had last year with Michel Dumontier.

Michel is the Distinguished Professor of Data Science at Maastricht University and is the inventor & founder of the Semanticscience Integrated Ontology (or SIO as we like to call it). We spend the hour digging into the history and thinking that went into the design of SIO.

Bring us your burning ontology questions for us to answer on-air this season and get early access to our episodes over on patreon.

Announcing Season 2 of The Opinionated Ontologist! This year we kick off with a new addition in the studio: producer Braeden Doane joins Jamie to help bring listener questions to the airwaves, as we dig into upper ontologies, ontology engineering, and real world applications with another round of all-star guests. In this mini episode, we'll hear a bit about Braeden's pathway into ontology and take a peek at what we're looking forward to this next season. For listener questions and early access to feature episodes, connect with us over at patreon.com/opinionatedontologist.

We discuss reification using the W3C draf recommendation RDF 1.2, modeling choices, and how the approach is similar to, and different from, edge properties in Labeled Property Graphs.
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