You name the things you manage. The platform does the math.
Before the platform can model your operation it needs your vocabulary: what a store, a lane or an account is, what is measured about it, how things connect, what actions exist and what each costs. You write that down once, you own it, and you can change it without waiting for a software release.
In plain termsA shared dictionary of your business, written by you. (Engineers call this an ontology.)
Five declarations
What the ontology contains.
Governed like the asset it is
If the vocabulary is not governed, nothing built on it is either.
| Property | Why |
|---|---|
| Versioned | A change to a state dimension changes what every downstream conclusion means. |
| Reviewable | Adding an intervention creates a spend path; it needs a second pair of eyes. |
| Attributable | Every change records who made it and when. |
| Scoped | Tenant and domain boundaries are respected; one business unit’s vocabulary does not leak into another’s. |
| Reversible | A change can be rolled back, because the previous version is a real artifact. |
A platform that lets anyone redefine “primary dimension” in production has no meaningful audit story, however good its models are.
Building an ontology is a workshop, not a project
Name the entities
Usually the nouns people already argue about.
Name the state
The three to six numbers that decide whether someone acts.
Pick the primary dimension
The one that carries money. This is contentious, and worth the argument.
Declare the dynamics
How state moves when nothing unusual happens. Domain knowledge, not data science, does the work here.
List the interventions and price them
Usually the most revealing hour of the engagement, because most organizations have never priced their own actions.
Declare the horizon
How far ahead must this be right?
Most domains reach a first, useful ontology in a workshop. That is intentional: the barrier to a useful twin should be domain knowledge, which you have, not data science, which you may not.
Run the six-step workshop on one domain
Bring the nouns your team argues about weekly. We will leave the session with a first ontology and a forward position for each entity.