What does Palantir CEO Alex Karp's favorite word actually mean? (www.businessinsider.com)

Palantir CEO Alex Karp frequently invokes the term "ontology" — a philosophical word meaning the study of existence — both rhetorically and as the name of a core product in Palantir’s Foundry platform. The word surfaced recently in a public spat with investor Michael Burry after Burry bet against Palantir; Karp defended the company by pointing to its ontology-driven tech as a competitive strength. Karp’s philosophical background helps explain the affinity for the term, but at Palantir it’s not abstract: it’s a practical architecture for mapping the real world to an organization’s digital data. Technically, Palantir’s Ontology builds a canonical graph of entities (assets, products, orders, transactions) and their relationships so analytics, workflows and models operate on a single, consistent representation of the business. That enables use cases from supply‑chain alerts and predictive maintenance to HIPAA‑compliant life‑sciences data management. Palantir is expanding this concept to the edge — an "Edge Ontology" that runs on mobile and embedded devices for drones and robots — which means models and apps can use the same schema on-device for real-time decisions. For the AI/ML community, Ontology underscores the value of curated, schema-driven knowledge graphs and operational data models: they improve model inputs, governance, explainability and deployment across cloud and edge, and form a core part of Palantir’s claimed moat.