How Ontologies Can Unlock LLM for Business

This post delves into the transformative capabilities of Large Language Models, such as GPT-4, and examines the crucial role that the structured intelligence of ontologies can play in deploying LLMs in production environments.

🔵 The Power of LLMs:
LLMs have remarkable capabilities; they can craft letters, analyse data, orchestrate workflows, generate code, and much more. Companies such as Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are all investing heavily in this technology. Everything indicates that LLMs have enormous disruptive potential. However, there is a problem: they can hallucinate. So, how can serious businesses ever use their full power in production?

🔵 The Structure of Ontologies:
Ontologies provide a formal and structured way to represent knowledge within specific domains. They enable computers to understand and reason in a logical, consistent, and controlled manner. Ontologies are also human-readable, editable, and auditable artefacts that can be kept under source control.

🔵 It's All 'Just' Semantics:
The combination of LLMs and ontologies creates a powerful synergy. This synergy allows organisations to harness the capabilities of LLMs within the guardrails of a controlled structure. This collaborative partnership establishes a reinforcing feedback loop of continuous improvement. Ontologies provide context to prompts and validate the LLMs' responses, while the LLMs help extend ontologies with missing concepts.

🔵 Bringing It All Together in a Working Memory Graph:
LLMs and Ontologies can be combined in a design pattern that I call the 'Working Memory Graph'. Within a Working Memory Graph (WMG), LLM embedding vectors, ontologies, facts from the Knowledge Graph, and graph-based analytics are all integrated. The WMG uses ontologies to help build prompts, translates natural language questions into a graph structure, employs Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GRAG) to gather facts, and uses LLM-based GML to perform graph-based analytics.

In summary, Large Language Models represent not merely a passing fad but a paradigm shift that progressive organisations can ill afford to ignore. Ontologies offer a versatile yet disciplined framework, enabling organisations to move forward with LLMs while remaining in control.