Shared Language as Infrastructure
We design controlled vocabularies and taxonomies as working infrastructure, extending them into ontologies when the domain requires richer semantics. The resulting structures support retrieval and measurement as well as system integration. Shared definitions bring fragmented search results into a coherent structure and reconcile divergent reporting categories. Meaningful ambiguity remains visible, while specialisation and change are retained. Genuine domain disagreement is therefore easier to distinguish from a difference in language.
Terms and concepts are gathered from live systems and documents. Standards supply an external reference, while user language and subject expertise reveal how the domain operates in practice. We test every candidate against the intended uses of the model. A navigation hierarchy is kept distinct from equivalence. Association is treated differently from a formal domain relationship, so the model uses only the expressive complexity that the task justifies. Stable identifiers anchor each concept. Definitions and alternative labels make it usable. External alignments connect it beyond the organisation. Practical ownership governs versioning and deprecation, allowing the vocabulary to develop with the domain.
Ontology alignment, evaluation, and design
Conceptual models grounded in reality and useful in practice.
We design focused domain ontologies and evaluate the models an organisation has inherited. Where conceptual systems were developed for different purposes, we create defensible alignments between them. The work begins with the questions users need to answer. Those questions reveal the domain distinctions the model must preserve, while maintainer review shows whether it can be understood and extended. The result is a conceptual structure that remains coherent and useful in practice.
Questions Before Formalism
Competency questions provide the organising evidence: they identify the entities that must be represented and the relations between them. They also reveal relevant constraints and establish how success will be assessed. Logical checks test the model before review considers its coverage and redundancy. Naming and documentation determine whether people can use it, while extensibility and operational fitness show whether it will endure. When aligning models, lexical signals and structural similarity are treated as candidates rather than conclusions. Statistical evidence refines those candidates and expert judgement determines their meaning. Every mapping retains provenance and context, together with its confidence, so users can distinguish accepted equivalence from provisional correspondence.
Structured, Unstructured, and Multimedia Resource Ingestion
A governed knowledge environment for evidence in every relevant medium.
We design ingestion environments that turn databases and documents into evidence that can be identified and searched. Presentations and diagrams retain their structure, while recordings and images remain connected to the cues specific to their medium. Specialist formats receive the treatment their domain requires. The resulting evidence can be related across sources without flattening it. Pipelines preserve source-specific structures and contextual cues and maintain an auditable path from every extracted or normalised resource to its original item.
Source-Specific Pipelines
Pipeline design begins with the properties and risks of each source collection, interpreted through the downstream questions it must serve. Text may require parsing before segmentation. Recorded material may need transcription. Entity recognition and media analysis are applied only where their evidence is meaningful, with metadata extraction tied to the same source context. Normalisation and deduplication follow thresholds specific to the collection. Rights controls govern use, while provenance capture preserves derivation throughout. Quality is measured at consequential stages. Human review is concentrated where ambiguity or sensitivity makes unqualified automation inappropriate, and where a false association would carry material cost. The governed outputs can support search and analytics. They can also ground agentic systems or record review without creating a separate untraceable copy of extracted content for every use.
Our experience
Problems our experts have solved
Taxonomies, Ontologies, Controlled Vocabularies
Our team unified subject classification for a technical publisher. Its website and editorial system used different categories, while the archive and analytics platform followed schemes of their own. We delivered a governed vocabulary with stable concept identifiers. Preferred and alternative labels supported current use, and mappings led back to each legacy scheme. The publisher could use one conceptual structure for navigation and retrieval. The same structure supported analysis and recommendation, while each system adopted it at an appropriate pace.
Ontology alignment, evaluation, and design
We helped a research platform query across three established ontologies maintained by different scientific communities. Automated matching had proposed hundreds of equivalences that erased important methodological distinctions. Our experts evaluated each candidate against real research questions. We introduced a small bridging ontology, then classified mappings by their strength and context. The resulting alignment enabled cross-domain discovery while preserving the source semantics of each community.
Structured, Unstructured, and Multimedia Resource Ingestion
For an infrastructure operator, our experts brought maintenance evidence from work orders and scanned manuals into a coherent retrieval environment. Inspection photographs were connected to engineering drawings, while technician recordings supplied context absent from the written record. We created a multimodal workflow that extracted equipment references and resolved them against asset identifiers. Both file-level and extraction provenance were retained. Engineers could retrieve supporting material by asset or failure mode, then narrow it by location or procedure. The source from which each result had been derived remained available for inspection.