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Ontologies Overview

Source: https://www.palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontologies/ontologies-overview/ Captured during the ontology-parity effort. Concrete feature taxonomy only.

Core concept

An ontology is the foundational artifact organizing ontological resources across a Foundry instance, with a 1:1 mapping to spaces and organization-based access control.

Primary resource types

  1. Object types — fundamental data-entity definitions; properties, metadata, behavioral config; can integrate with external systems; user-editable.
  2. Link types — relationships between object types; directional and semantic; metadata-reference config.
  3. Action types — function-backed or rules-based operations; parameters with filtering/defaults; submission criteria; side effects (notifications, webhooks, schedule triggers); inline edits, batched execution, permissions.
  4. Interfaces — abstract type definitions for polymorphic modeling; implementation + extension; interface-specific link types.
  5. Shared properties — reusable property definitions across object types; struct-compatible; metadata-reference support.
  6. Object type groups — organizational containers for related object types (logical categorization, search/explore taxonomy).

Property system

  • Base types: primitive and composite structures.
  • Property reducers: aggregation/transformation logic.
  • Derived properties: computed attributes.
  • Edit-only properties: restricted modification scope.
  • Required/mandatory properties: integrity constraints.
  • Value & conditional formatting: display customization.
  • Structs: composite property types with a main-field designation.

Lifecycle management

  • Branching — versioning + proposal-review workflows.
  • Change persistence — save / review / restore change history.
  • Migration — cross-ontology data movement.
  • Versioning — function and value-type version management.

Access & organization

  • Private ontologies — single-org, org-marked resources.
  • Shared ontologies — multi-org pools with security isolation.
  • Project-based permissions and ontology permissions (legacy + current models).

Search & discovery

  • Semantic search with document processing; multimodal + embedding-model integration; ontology-augmented generation; SQL-based analysis and text-search syntax.

Usage monitoring

  • Volume tracking, indexing-compute measurement, query-compute usage monitoring.