How an FDE Builds an Ontology from Field Notes | A Dictionary of Nouns and Verbs an AI Can Traverse
The dictionary of a company's nouns and verbs gathered through interviews, observation, ethnography, the KJ method, and video analysis is not usable by an AI agent as a dictionary. The sixth article in our FDE practice series explains how to extract five things from transcripts and observation records, nouns, verbs, relationships, states, and exceptions, and turn them into a structure of meaning an AI can traverse: an ontology. It covers the definition, why Palantir put it at the center of its product, its use in GraphRAG, the boundary between AI extraction and human meaning-making, and how it differs from data modeling in contract development. Putting ownership of the dictionary on the customer's side is the condition for the customer to run on their own.