Whither Ontologies?. Palantir-lite with Claude Code and… | by Michael Fitzgerald | Aug, 2025 | Medium
Disclaimer: Claude Code wrote large chunks of this after interviewing me, reading the code and reading the transcript of a recorded codewalk. I will still take responsibility for the poor writing.
I think it was around Palantir’s Q4 earnings call when I binged a bunch of Karp interviews and first heard him mention ontologies. The quote above stuck in my mind, but it’s probably my own synthesis. Though if you’ve watched Karp, it’s plausibly his own.
I was familiar with ontology as a philosophical discipline, perhaps best described by Quine as “on what there is”, but put more plainly as the study of being, existence and the nature of reality. Woah. Heady stuff. But what did that have to do with data and AI? Clearly I should be using them if the eggheads at Palantir are (I say that lovingly, mad respect).
I did some cursory research, finding Palantir’s own documentation, as well as a significant history of ontology research in computer science. In that context, an ontology is at its core a formal description of real life that maps to data. The set of entities, their properties, and their relationships. It functions as a semantic layer on top of the data, providing meaning. It turns out that such a description is incredible context for an LLM to manipulate and analyze data.
