When Do Developers Not Have to Talk to Stakeholders?

An ontologist can bridge¹ domain expertise and software development via production of

1. a semi-informal so-called intermediate representation² that can be understood by domain experts, and

2. a formal ontology / knowledge graph that represents the domain in a machine-actionable way.

When you do software development, you want to take the human out of the loop as much as possible – really automate it, least amount of manual effort, just minimize that…When I explain to [developers] that an ontology or knowledge graph [is] basically an ontologist talking to stakeholders and making sure that all the implicit knowledge they have is expressed in an explicit structural format that systems can also read…a light bulb [is] lit in their head, like “Oh…so it means we do not have to talk to stakeholders?”…Yes!…You can basically have the ontologist talk to the stakeholders and put it into a format that you just query."³

And if you switch-hit as both a domain expert and a developer, “a little semantics goes a long way” – developing competence in and discipline towards producing intermediate representations can increase your capacity to effectively collaborate/delegate and thus increase professional impact.