Dougal Watt: Human-Guided, LLM-Assisted Ontology Modeling – Episode 55

Dougal Watt

Most conversations about taming generative AI focus on guardrails bolted on after the fact. Dougal Watt takes a different approach: generate the meaning first, as an ontology, and let everything else — agents, APIs, knowledge graphs — flow from that.

His standing-room-only workshop on AI-augmented ontology creation at the Knowledge Graph Conference drew both business executives and semantic engineers, highlighting the broad interest in the need for accurate, trustworthy AI.

We talked about:

his work at the company he founded, Graph Research Labs and their meaning-first approach

his very popular workshop on AI safety and ontologies and guardrails at the Knowledge Graph Conference

the implications in AI architectures of the need to balance time, risk, and regulation

the five main approaches that organizations are using to comply with regulations:

guardrails

multi-agent refinement

governance frameworks

sandboxing of agents