2 - What is the Foundry Ontology?
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The Foundry Ontology is a customizable semantic layer that translates designated Foundry datasets into objects, properties, and links between them. This track will occasionally use the phrase Object Layer to refer to the Ontology, because it is a semantic "layer" above Foundry's data layer.
The following table illustrates the way datasets are mapped to the object layer:
| Datasets | Ontology Objects |
|---|
| Dataset ⟶ | Object Type |
|---|---|
| Rows ⟶ | Objects |
| Columns ⟶ | Properties |
| Joins ⟶ | Links |
In the following notional Foundry dataset called customers, each row becomes an individual customer object with properties backed by the column values. The overall dataset represents the object type. In this way, the object Maxine Dorsey is an object of the type Customer.
As you will discover in this course, the Ontology is deeply integrated into user-facing analytical and operational tools and is an effective way to mobilize your data for organizational decision-making at scale.