We begin our understanding of ontology by first looking at the notion of a concept. A concept is simply an object in your domain that the assistant is able to recognize. For example, in the marketing domain, we have concepts for mailings, open-rates, click-rates, etc. A concept in denoted by a colon :. For example :Mailings denotes the mailings concepts. Concepts should additionally be prefixed with the domain of your skill. For example, marketing:Mailings signifies the mailings concept in the marketing domain.
Concepts and their relationship to other concepts are defined in an ontology. In fact, an ontology is simply a set of relationships between different concepts in rdf format, i.e. subject-predicate-object triples. Consider the following examples below.
:OpenRate subClassOf :Showable
Here we specify that :OpenRate is a concept which subclasses or derives from the :Showable concept. This system is able to visually render all :Showable objects, so we are effectively making our open rate concept viewable to the end user.
:Mailings isListOf :Mailing
Here we specify that the :Mailings concept is a list composed of individual :Mailing concepts. This is useful for actions that the assistant performs when working with collections.
Certain native predicates have significant meaning for our system. We will detail a few of them below.
subClassOf – a subClassOf b means that a inherits all of the attributes which b contains. This is particularly useful in the cases that we need to model a hierarchical domain. For instance, :SalesOrder subClassOf :Order allows a particular entity to auto derive attributes from its base concept.isListOf – a listOf b means that a is a collection of b. This enables our system to automatically perform data operations on top of collections. For instance, :Orders isListOf :Order and :Order hasAttribute :Quantity, we immediately begin to ask questions such as ‘show me all orders where quantity is above 500’.