u/CattleMaleficent8410

I have gotten really into the weeds with ontologies lately. Theoretically an LPG structure that is grounded to your data should solve so many agentic rag issues.

I know it’s in preview but what currently exists in building an ontology in fabric is laughably thin. All you can really do at this point is make named foreign key relationships. You can’t add entity descriptions, cardinality, inheritance/heirarchy, and for the relationships you can’t add real properties. I did see you can have a ‘junction’ type table be the table for binding between source and target in the relationship as long as it has the keys to both.. but you can’t do anything with the fields in that junction table.

Looking everywhere for the actual planned future offerings in ontologies and it’s sooooo thin. They do a have an ontology sandbox in GitHub which has more traditional ontology features. But that seems more geared towards teaching you about ontologies (essentially Labelled Property graphs), and I don’t think signals what is actually going to ship in fabric.

Their API shows they might have some class/sub class stuff going on in the background. Does anyone here got insight or intel into what’s next? Or anyone having any sort of success with what exists today?

Architect at a PE-backed service and construction company.

We have 10+ legacy orgs under one roof, each with its own ERP consists of a mix of Sage 50/100/300, Acumatica, Business Central, Dynamics 365 CRM, Great Plains, a homegrown ERP, plus a couple of CRMs.

The company hired an external vendor/team to build a pipeline for consolidated reporting. This is where that landed.

Fivetran → Snowflake → dbt (~317 models, 32K lines of SQL) → Power BI (f64 capacity).

Basically the company was working towards a one big table model for reporting and brute forcing it with sql tables and some massive unions. There was a lot of business logic baked in at source level pulls and then some minimal mdm style mapping layered in along the way. They really only completed a few portions of the business (things like invoices, gl connections, and timesheets). Large swaths of the business and its operations are untouched (work orders, inventory, sales, etc). A team of 15 or so from the external vendor worked on the project for a year and I was brought on near the end of the engagement to be the internal owner.

Managing it has been a nightmare and advancing it forward has been impossible as a team of 1. Frankly it has been good enough for some consolidated reporting which has kept upper management and PE seemingly happy, but now everyone is on the AI bandwagon.

I’ve been asked to look into what it would take to best set up our infrastructure for an agentic future. I can say what was built and pushed out was really working towards a goal of reporting as the final output and doesn’t feel all that much recyclable for this endeavor.

The more I have learned and read, the more I have sort of gravitated towards some sort of LPG or ontology structure so that agents can be grounded in the right context, rules and data. For a lot of the businesses use cases they want data more real time, more components of the business complete and sanitized, and they want agents to have ‘hands’ to effectively be able to write back and take action in source ERP’s.

The problems I am trying to understand are.

1. What are the best tools or platforms nowadays for sanitation and unification of data across platforms? Dbt is not my jam.
2. Has anyone truly had success consolidating onto fabric with large complicated enterprise scale endeavors like this? We are a Microsoft shop and a lot synergies should exist by staying in the eco system.
3. Have people really started to cross into the realm of agents taking actions in base ERP’s and systems?

There are like 50 other things I could go down a rabbit hole on but I’m just hoping for some direction or conversation with HUMANS that have gone down the path or are struggling along it with me.