# Wrote a free vendor-neutral guide to building a first ontology — what did I get wrong?

**URL:** <https://community.palantir.com/t/wrote-a-free-vendor-neutral-guide-to-building-a-first-ontology-what-did-i-get-wrong/7025>\
**Category:** Ask the Community\
**Tags:** ontology-management, build-with-aip\
**Created:** [July 28, 2026, 11:52am UTC](https://community.palantir.com/t/wrote-a-free-vendor-neutral-guide-to-building-a-first-ontology-what-did-i-get-wrong/7025 "2026-07-28T11:52:25Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![qatlama](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/fbc32d/32.png) [@qatlama](https://community.palantir.com/u/qatlama)\
**Post date:** [July 28, 2026, 11:52am UTC](https://community.palantir.com/t/wrote-a-free-vendor-neutral-guide-to-building-a-first-ontology-what-did-i-get-wrong/7025/1 "2026-07-28T11:52:25Z")

</div>

Hi All

I am an independent author (not affiliated with Palantir).

I wrote a free guide, “Ontology Is All You Need: A Practical Implementation Guide for Midsize Companies,”. Link to PDF https://www.applayerai.com/ontology

Goal is to teach 50–1,000-person companies to create their first ontology.

It’s vendor-neutral by design. Many companies will start in tools they already own and graduate to Foundry later.

Before it goes wide, I’d genuinely value this community’s judgment and feedback.

**Scope:** I cap version one at 15–20 object types. Where do real first implementations actually land? is that ceiling right?

**Sequencing:** The guide builds the semantic layer first (weeks 3–8), then adds kinetics: two or three governed actions for a single workflow (weeks 8–11). Many of you work use-case-backwards instead. When does each approach win?

**Timeline:** Is 90 days honest for a midsize company with one half-time data lead and part-time domain experts, ending in one piloted agent behind approval gates?

**Pitfalls:** I list eight (god object, kitchen sink, database-shaped objects, action sprawl, and so on, credited to Palantir’s talks). What’s the #1 first-timer mistake you see that I’ve missed?

**Accuracy:** Anything in how I’ve represented the semantic/kinetic split or the ontology concept generally that would make a practitioner wince?

I’ll incorporate what I learn in this thread.

Thank you!

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![jakehop](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/b5a626/32.png) [@jakehop](https://community.palantir.com/u/jakehop)\
**Post date:** [July 29, 2026, 8:54am UTC](https://community.palantir.com/t/wrote-a-free-vendor-neutral-guide-to-building-a-first-ontology-what-did-i-get-wrong/7025/2 "2026-07-29T08:54:09Z")

</div>

Not the feedback you asked for, but my AI slop detector went off immediately. The AI sentence structure and the barrage of AI tropes makes this a very hard read.

I would start by rewriting it in your own language. AI can be a great help, but think about this from the reader’s perspective: Why should I read this, when I can just get Claude to output the same quality of text, tailored to my specific situation?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![qatlama](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/fbc32d/32.png) [@qatlama](https://community.palantir.com/u/qatlama)\
**Post date:** [July 29, 2026, 9:14am UTC](https://community.palantir.com/t/wrote-a-free-vendor-neutral-guide-to-building-a-first-ontology-what-did-i-get-wrong/7025/3 "2026-07-29T09:14:02Z")

</div>

Thank you for feedback. This is very helpful. I will definitely re-write it.