Ontology.lol

Ontology.lol: ontologies without the ceremony

An ontology is the set of types and named relationships a business uses to describe its world, and every fact in it is a triple: subject, predicate, object. The W3C standards for writing triples are RDF 1.1 (2014) and JSON-LD 1.1 (2020), and schema.org, the vocabulary most websites use, has 826 types and 1,540 properties in version 30.1.

An ontology sounds like a philosophy seminar and behaves like a spreadsheet with opinions. "Acme Roofing" is a RoofingContractor, it serves Miami, and Miami is a City: three nouns, two relationships, one small ontology. Yours is bigger, but not fancier.

Triples, and a builderSubject, predicate, object. Type rows, get Turtle, N-Triples and JSON-LD. Taxonomy vs ontologyA tree of types versus types plus relationships, with SKOS, OWL 2 and schema.org side by side. Entity resolutionHow OWL, SKOS, schema.org and Wikidata say "same thing", from strict to loose. Why it mattersHow many websites publish structured data, and what Google says it does with it.

The standards behind an ontology

Every ontology on the web sits on a short stack of published standards. Here is what each one is for and its current status.

Standard What it is for Status and date
RDF 1.1 Concepts The data model: a graph is a set of triples (subject, predicate, object) W3C Recommendation, 25 February 2014
RDF 1.2 Concepts The next version of the data model W3C Candidate Recommendation Draft, 12 November 2026
RDF Schema 1.1 "A data-modelling vocabulary for RDF data": classes, subclasses, property domains and ranges W3C Recommendation, 25 February 2014
SKOS Taxonomies, thesauri and classification schemes, linked by broader and narrower W3C Recommendation, 18 August 2009
OWL 2 Ontologies "with formally defined meaning": classes, properties, individuals, data values W3C Recommendation (Second Edition), 11 December 2012
Turtle Triples written as compact text (media type text/turtle) W3C Recommendation, 25 February 2014
JSON-LD 1.1 Triples written as JSON (application/ld+json); the format Google recommends for structured data in web pages W3C Recommendation, 16 July 2020
Schema.org A shared vocabulary of 826 types and 1,540 properties Community project, version 30.1, 16 September 2026

Sources: each standard's own page on w3.org and schema.org, and Google Search Central's introduction to structured data for the JSON-LD recommendation, all checked 13 November 2026. The triples page compares all six RDF formats.

Build some triples

The triple builder turns rows of subject, predicate and object into Turtle, N-Triples and JSON-LD, and checks your predicates against schema.org 30.1. It runs in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Open the triple builder

Where to start

New to all of this? Read triples first, then taxonomy vs ontology. If your business shows up under three names, go to entity resolution.

Written by Joel Maldonado at Neural Command.