Dougal Watt: Human-Guided, LLM-Assisted Ontology Modeling – Episode 55

Dougal Watt Most conversations about taming generative AI focus on guardrails bolted on after the fact. Dougal Watt takes a different approach: generate the meaning first, as an ontology, and let everything else — agents, APIs, knowledge graphs — flow from that. His standing-room-only workshop on AI-augmented ontology creation at the Knowledge Graph Conference drew both business executives and semantic engineers, highlighting the broad interest in the need for accurate, trustworthy AI. We talked about: his work at the company he founded, Graph Research Labs and their meaning-first approach his very popular workshop on AI safety and ontologies and guardrails at the Knowledge Graph Conference the implications in AI architectures of the need to balance time, risk, and regulation the five main approaches that organizations are using to comply with regulations: guardrails multi-agent refinement governance frameworks sandboxing of agents ontology grounding how his Semantic Agent Harness delivers accuracy improvements better than even the best graph RAG systems how they build decision tracing into their framework the need to keep a human in the loop across the ontology-building process, as well as the crucial role of human judgement in automation workflows how LLMs can accelerate the task of integrating data in various organization silos how agentic modeling permits ongoing consistency checks on competency questions the need for more ontologists in AI work, but also tooling that he has created to facilitate ontology work how good ontology methods give organizations accuracy that is tailored to their unique knowledge Dougal's bio Dougal Watt is the CEO and Co-Founder of Graph Research Labs, inventor of multiple patents and patents pending covering ontology-driven declarative generation, governed AI agents, and automated enterprise stack creation. Previously IBM Chief Technologist and a global expert in information architecture. Open Group Distinguished Architect. IBM Certified Enterprise & Information Architect. TOGAF Certified. 30+ years across four continents building and fixing systems for some of the world's most demanding organisations. International speaker, most recently speaking about AI Safety and Guardrails at the Knowledge Graph Conference 2026 in New York. Connect with Dougal online LinkedIn Graph Research Labs Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: Podcast intro transcript This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 55. Generative AI gives ontologists powerful new capabilities that can help automate workflows and build and maintain ontologies. But as with any powerful technology you need wise guidance and sound methods to get the most out the tool. That's what Dougal Watt does. He has developed an approach that leverages the power of LLMs to accelerate ontology development while at the same time guiding every step of the process with human judgement and discretion. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 55 of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Dougal Watt. Dougal is the CEO and founder of Graph Research Labs in New Zealand. He's also the former chief technologist for IBM in New Zealand before he started his company. So welcome, Dougal. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Dougal: Thanks, Larry, and thanks for having me on. Great to be here. Well, what I'm doing these days, I started Graph Research Labs to explore a really exciting intersection between information architecture, which has been part of my practice for a long time, information architecture, graph, and AI, and in particular using ontologies and graph to solve some of the really major problems that I've seen throughout my career. Those sort of problems they ... What we've seen over time is that most enterprise IT, it just becomes really focused on the past. You see layer upon layer of systems, often over decades. Each gets laid onto the last. And then organizations, they just end up spending more time, more effort to maintain that past than they are to build the future. And unfortunately, AI is making that worse, not better. So again, organizations are layering agents onto that same siloed set of foundations, and then they wonder why data's not accurate or governance just doesn't keep up and governance evaporates. Larry: Yeah- Dougal: So what we're doing, we flip that around at GRL. We focus on generating the meaning first. So instead of the meaning being an afterthought, we start from meaning and then we move into the data and then we generate that software stack. So the idea is that you shift to modeling your business once as an ontology, and then our declarative engine generates that whole stack for you. So you can generate the things you need, governed agents, APIs, apps, knowledge graphs, MCP servers, data products. You can generate all that in minutes. So that's been the focus. Larry: Very cool. And a lot of that ... There's so much in there. One, I love that it's messy and AI is not making it any better, but everybody I hear in Silicon Valley says, "No, we can just fix that." But that was one of the points of your talk at ... Oh, quick background. We met at the Knowledge Graph Conference last month where you did this great presentation on ... Was it AI augmented or LLM augmented ontology creation? I forget the exact title, but a really interesting presentation with a really well-developed workflow around how to use the capabilities of LLMs productively, but with really tight guardrails, human interventions, and things like that. Can you talk a little bit about ... Well, the other thing about that workshop is it was packed. I somehow got there early enough to get a seat, which I was grateful for. What motivated you to put that workshop together and why do you think it was so packed? Dougal: What motivated me is I saw this extreme focus on AI and then people needing to understand ... Well, I guess I'll take it back a bit. I think what was interesting to me is that it was so packed, and there was such a strong lineup of speakers at the conference in general, but I was really genuinely surprised how much interest there was in that workshop. And what we covered, we covered a lot of ground, but it's fundamentally about AI safety and ontologies and guardrails. So that was the focus. And I've never actually had a session before where you have to open up an overflow room and then people are sitting on the floor. It's kind of crazy. For a technical workshop, that's just really rare. Dougal: And I think this is one of the really interesting points is that a large number of people that were there, it might've been around 50-50, were senior executives, vice presidents, and their senior technical staff. And to me, that's a really strong signal that what's important to people is this AI safety and ontology issue and it's being driven from the top of the organization. And that's exactly what you want to see. Dougal: And I think as to why there's that focus on the ontologies, well, everyone's tried AI and they've tried different approaches, and they're finding that getting that into production is a real challenge because accuracy's not high enough. So if you're aiming for greater than 90% accuracy, whatever the use case is, you need an approach like ontology. So ontology seems to be the solution and people are looking for that solution, they're looking for tools, but obviously they're using AI, they're using LLMs. How do those two come together? How do they meet in the middle? How do we get value from this amazing new technology and it's just a technology? But how do we harness it, couple it, make it safe, and be able to drive the kind of value that we need in our organization so it can move into production and be accurate? Larry: Yeah, I think it's interesting. I remember even three years ago at the Knowledge Graph Conference that the budding, the looming talks about neuro-symbolic AI, hybrid AI, the combination of the two has been there. And it's really interesting that it took three years to get to matter-of-fact, like, yeah, this is clearly the place. And it's really gratifying to hear that there were business people in there as well, because it's not hard to get us excited about that. Dougal: We love it. Yeah. Larry: Yeah, executives. But one of the things that came up subsequently to that talk is one, that need for safety and guardrails and methods of taming these beasts is that there's this kind of disconnect between the insane acceleration and pace of change in the technology and the regulatory environment that drives a lot of the requirements for these things. Can you talk a little bit about that? Dougal: Yeah, we do a lot of work in that regulatory space, and I think the more I think about it, I think we're kind of at a really strange point in history. So we're sort of caught, like you say, this conundrum. It's between time, risk, and regulation. And so as society speeds up, the risk grows larger and then regulations are expanding exponentially. So again, the conundrum, that's making decisions slower. So in a sense, there's a impression, there's that disconnect between politics and regulators and technology instead of people actually working together to make life better and to harness this technology in the right way. Dougal: So the way I think of it as time speeds up, risk concentrates. And you can think of lots of examples of this. Trading algorithms can move a financial position in microseconds and it once took days to build that position. Or like money laundering, that chain can now move through accounts before the first alert fires off and people know about it. So what that says is that speed without accuracy, that's not progress,...