Solutions
The shared model of your business that lets humans and agents reason about it and act on it safely.
01Overview
Every organization already has an ontology. It lives in the heads of experienced staff, in the column names of old databases and in the way people argue about what counts as an active customer. Writing it down as a model changes what you can do. Reports agree, applications share definitions and agents have a map instead of a pile of tables.
An ontology has three parts. Objects are the things the business cares about, each with properties. Links are the relationships between objects, such as a borrower holds an account or a farmer delivers a lot. Actions are the operations that can change the state of the world, such as approve a loan or reject a delivery, each with rules about who may do it and when. Together they describe how the business really works, not how a schema happened to be built.
We design ontologies with the people who run the process. Modelling is workshop and review work as much as technical work. Our engineers draw the model with your domain experts, test it against real questions, map it to the source systems and put it under version control. The result is the centre of everything else we build, from analytics to agents. Read our point of view on the ontology layer for the longer argument.
02
To make this concrete, here is a small ontology for a farm cooperative. It is an illustration of the method, not a customer deployment.
Objects: Farmer, Farm Plot, Delivery, Lot, Grade, Warehouse, Buyer, Payment and Input Loan. Each has properties such as location, crop, weight, moisture and date.
Links: a Farmer owns Farm Plots, makes Deliveries and holds Input Loans. A Delivery becomes part of a Lot. A Lot is stored in a Warehouse, sold to a Buyer and settled by Payments. Actions: Grade Delivery, Merge into Lot, Release Payment and Flag Quality Dispute, each with an approver and a record.
03What you get
We identify the nouns of your business and define each as an object with properties, identifiers and an owner. We resolve duplicates, such as one customer with three IDs, by matching and by agreeing a golden source. Objects are modelled once and reused everywhere.
Customer means one thing, everywhere.
We capture how objects relate and the rules that govern them, such as a loan cannot exceed an approved limit or a lot must be graded before sale. Links are typed and directional. Rules are written in a form that people can read and systems can enforce.
The value is in the connections, not the tables.
We define the actions that can change the world and attach permissions, validation and approval to each. An agent that wants to approve a payment calls the action. The action checks the rules and the actor, and writes a record. Nothing happens by writing directly to a table.
Safe automation begins with safe verbs.
We map each object and property to the systems that hold it, including core banking platforms, ERPs, spreadsheets, mobile money and scanned documents. Lineage records where each value came from. When a source changes, the mapping is updated and the model stays stable.
The model should outlive any one system.
We set up how the model changes: proposals, review, testing, promotion across environments and deprecation. Owners are named for each object. Changes are versioned so applications and agents are not surprised.
A model nobody can change safely will be bypassed.
We expose the ontology to agents through APIs and tool interfaces, so an agent can discover objects, query them and call actions within its permissions. Prompts and tools refer to the same definitions that dashboards use. Answers cite the objects and sources behind them.
Agents are more reliable when they share your vocabulary.
Free 30 minutes with an engineer.
04African sectors
Situation
A bank has separate views of the same customer in core banking, cards, mobile money and collections, so risk and service teams disagree.
What it does
The ontology defines Customer, Account, Facility, Transaction and Case, with links and rules for limits, exposure and review. Reports and agents use it.
Human decides
The head of risk owns definitions of exposure and limit. Credit officers decide on exceptions.
05Boltcliq platform
Boltcliq product
Is the home of the ontology: studio, versioning, connectors, query layer and APIs for people and agents.
One source of business meaning.
Boltcliq product
Decides who and what may read objects and run actions, using attribute and relationship based rules.
Permissions follow the model.
Boltcliq product
Governs which parts of the ontology an agent may load as context and which actions it may call.
Agents see only what the task needs.
06
Does
Does not
07FAQ
Experience you can lean on
Immersed in technology and across many different verticals, so the people on your project have done this before.
Ontologies
Tell us the problem. An engineer, not a salesperson, answers.
The shared model of your business that lets humans and agents reason about it and act on it safely.
