Nvidia – open-source auto-ontology(github.com)
288 points by campervans 8 days ago | 142 comments
tl;dr: NVIDIA has open-sourced Auto-Ontology, a service that sits next to enterprise databases and compiles their metadata into a semantic ontology—mapping business terms to columns, reviewed SQL measures, and table relationships—so agents can generate more accurate SQL instead of guessing from raw schemas stuffed into context windows. It exposes this context via MCP, REST, and agent skills, includes an answerability check to reduce confident-but-wrong responses, and ships with an eval harness benchmarking against BIRD, BEAVER, and others. It runs via Docker Compose, supports 10 database engines, and defaults to NVIDIA NIM models but works with any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
HN Discussion:
  • ↓README is poorly written and needs clearer explanation of what the tool actually does
  • ↓Adding more LLM layers won't fix fundamental LLM reliability issues with data grounding
  • ↓Existing semantic web standards like OWL/RDF/SparQL may already solve this problem better
  • ↑Enterprise ontology is a real painful problem and this tool might genuinely help
  • ↓Requiring an NVIDIA API key undermines the open-source value proposition