"Knowledge, when handled properly, is to a great extent cumulative. Once we have it, we can use it to secure a wider and deeper array of further knowledge, and also to correct the errors we make as we go along. In this way, knowledge contributes to its own expansion and refinement. But it is only possible if what we know is recorded in such a way that it can quickly and easily be retrieved, and understood by those who need it."
Katherine Munn, Introduction: What is Ontology for? Applied Ontology An Introduction
Debra Schwartz and Tavi Truman are the CEO and CTO team at RocketUrBiz, a Real Estate Tech start-up in Silicon Valley, created to build technology for Agents, Brokers and Teams of Agent; to create a more valued position to engage the consumer and the business domain at new levels. In making the company, they ran into many unexpected and even surprising roadblocks and challenges; it was difficult to gain access to the public real estate data, real estate listing data, and related data, information, and knowledge found only in obscure, eclectic data sources, and in the minds of other real estate professionals.
As RocketUrBiz is a software development company based on Ontology-driven software development approaches, employing Ontological Engineering, the representation of knowledge, information and data are keen to critical thought leadership, high fidelity business and software design, accurate information system modeling and modern semantic application development.
Looking at the current state of Real Estate Datasets, Data management, Data Integration, Dataflow Process interoperability and Data access what they wanted in the genesis of design work, what they needed and required was a robust set of high-quality ontology and taxonomy artifacts of Real Estate. They know that to build more intelligent and more capable software systems starting from available datasets was not going to be enough, and a lot of expertise, via industry SME, was required to get the job done.
As in many other business domains’ data, the real estate data lay resident in relational databases encased in realm specific and narrowly bound application-oriented data models where data reuse and data integration acts as a block and challenge to innovate and advancement. As leaders at RocketUrBiz, they came to understand better how business philosophy, business practices, processes, idioms, and heuristics in the real estate space became part of the data and databases and to how information is used to gain and establish control, propagate defensive posturing and silo change and development.
Mr. Truman, working in the space of Ontology and as the company’s Ontologist, knows there was a veridic source to follow, to pattern after, in the way of designing, coding and using modern ontologies and the OBO Foundry was the first place to start. If we were going to build intelligent software components and system, purposed to leverage the many abilities of capable real estate agents and brokers, we had to start with a better source of data, information, and knowledge; thus, the need for modern ontologies in the Real Estate.
Ontology in Information Science and Philosophical Ontology, unlike Kantian, derived, traditional databases and data models, is not bound or attached to some singular purpose and intent for an application source, but instead, serves to create artifacts of knowledge that statically describe how things in reality persist and hold relationships to other things. Ontology is agnostics in nature and database are specific and bound to a particular application and or data model.