The interviews are complete. Someone worked with the domain expert to create ontology.md. Six months later, a report counts the same Customer thrice, despite the model’s purpose to prevent this, and it hasn’t been updated since launch.

An ontology is useful only when used by a team. A software ontology is a shared model of a domain—its entities, attributes, and relationships written to…

Two senior engineers argued for an hour over a bug. The fix took ten minutes, but the argument lasted fifty. One meant “active subscription” when saying _customer_ , the other meant “any account.” Both were correct but lacked a shared model.

A software ontology is an explicit, agreed-upon domain model, including concepts, meanings, and relationships. In DDD, it covers ubiquitous language,…

Open a mature codebase and grep for Customer. In billing, it means an active, paid account; in support, anyone who has sent an email; in analytics, a deduplicated household. The bug isn’t in one module, but in three teams misunderstanding they’re referring to the same thing.

A software ontology is a clearly defined, shared model of a domain that includes concepts, meanings, and relationships,…