Mike Donnelly explains a term:
The short version: Fabric Ontology is the semantic backbone of Microsoft Fabric. It’s the layer that defines what your business data actually means.
If you’ve ever worked in a large organization, you know the problem. One team calls them “Customers,” another calls them “Clients,” and a third calls them “Account Holders.” Without a shared meaning, your analytics become a mess of conflicting vocabularies. An ontology is just a structured way of naming things and describing their relationships so everyone—and every tool—is using the same dictionary.
I think this is all correct, but I think there’s something more to ontologies than that. At least in the Palantir world, the ontology is not just the business definitions and concepts, but it’s also the actions you can take against that data. In other words, you might have Customers, Clients, and Account Holders. You can add a new customer, update the customer details, send a welcome to a new account holder, etc. Each of these actions is baked into the ontology as well. That’s what makes it different from simply defining where the data lives and how we got it in its current shape.