Mike Pool
Mike Pool sees irony in the fact that semantic-technology practitioners struggle to use the word "semantics" in ways that meaningfully advance conversations about their knowlege-representation work.
In a recent LinkedIn post, Mike even proposed a moratorium on the use of the word.
We talked about:
his multi-decade career in knowledge representation and ontology practice
his opinion that we might benefit from a moratorium on the term "semantics"
the challenges in pinning down the exact scope of semantic technology
how semantic tech permits reusability and enables scalability
the balance in semantic practice between 1) ascribing meaning in tech architectures independent of its use in applications and 2) considering end-use cases
the importance of staying domain-focused as you do semantic work
how to stay pragmatic in your choice of semantic methods
how reification of objects is not inherently semantic but does create a framework for discovering meaning
how to understand and capture subtle differences in meaning of seemingly clear terms like "merger" or "customer"
how LLMs can facilitate capturing meaning
Mike's bio
Michael Pool works in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg, where he is working on a tool to create and deploy ontologies across the firm. Previously, he was a principal ontologist on the Amazon Product Knowledge team, and has also worked to deploy semantic technologies/approaches and enterprise knowledge graphs at a number of big banks in New York City. Michael also spent a couple of years on the famous Cyc project and has evaluated knowledge representation technologies for DARPA. He has also worked on tooling to integrate probabilistic and semantic models and oversaw development of an ontology to support a consumer-facing semantic search engine. He lives in New York City and loves to run around in circles in Central Park.
Connect with Mike online
LinkedIn
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/JlJjBWGwSDg
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 22. The word "semantics" is often used imprecisely by semantic-technology practitioners. It can describe a wide array of knowledge-representation practices, from simple glossaries and taxonomies to full-blown enterprise ontologies, any of which may be summarized in a conversation as "semantics." Mike Pool thinks that this dynamic - using a word that lacks precise meaning while assuming that it communicates a lot - may justify a moratorium on the use of the term.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone, welcome to episode number 22 of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Mike Pool. Mike is a longtime ontologist, a couple of decades plus. He recently took a position at Bloomberg. But he made this really provocative post on LinkedIn lately that I want to flesh out today, and we'll talk more about that throughout the rest of the show. Welcome, Mike, tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Mike:
Hey, thank you, Larry. Yeah. As you noted, I've just taken a position with Bloomberg and for these many years that you alluded to, I've been very heavily focused on building, doing knowledge representation in general. In the last let's say decade or so I've been particularly focused on using ontologies and knowledge graphs in large banks, or large organizations at least, to help organize disparate data, to make it more accessible, breakdown data silos, et cetera. It's particularly relevant in the finance industry where things can be sliced and diced in so many different ways. I find there's a really important use case in the financial space but in large organizations in general, in my opinion, for using ontology. So that's a lot of what I've been thinking about, to make that more accessible to the organization and to help them build these ontologies and utilize th...
