You Already Have an Ontology

Description and use

Developers often create multiple, inconsistent definitions of domain concepts, leading to drift and unreliable agent behavior. Consolidating these definitions into a single ontology eliminates mismatches and improves agent reliability.

Problem

Developers often create multiple, inconsistent definitions of domain concepts across codebases, leading to drift and unreliable agent behavior.

Outcome

Consolidating scattered ontology definitions eliminated mismatches, ensured agents had a reliable, authoritative knowledge base, and reduced maintenance overhead.

Workflow

• Audit existing code to identify duplicated domain concepts.
• Map each concept to its occurrences across backend, frontend, and UI layers.
• Create a unified definition (e.g., a shared TypeScript enum or a JSON schema).
• Replace all local definitions with the unified one, updating serializers and UI components.
• Add tests to ensure consistency and catch future drift.
• Document the ontology in a central place (e.g., README or internal wiki).

Evidence

The frontend believes in form_too_complex and unsupported_ats, which the backend cannot produce.

Source

The status vocabulary is the same story. ApplicationStatus has seven values in Python and five in TypeScript.

Source