Ontologies and a Creolized AI-discourse

The ghosts of the future are already here. In describing his musical journey at the Monk Music Soundbridge Project launch at the Trinidad Hilton on Thursday, February 20th, 2025, Machel Montano described the present as a moment when “this is not here again” and “this is not here yet.” Instead of an “Ark,” we need a “Bridge,” he proclaimed.

We live in a world that has not yet discovered how to describe itself in terms of what it is, but only in terms of what it has just now ceased to be. Only a bridge can take us across this portal.

The Techno-Renaissance is happening right now.  The Italian Renaissance was a period in European history when fresh ideas about art and science mushroomed and when new technologies were adopted. The Techno-Renaissance is birthing artificial life and unprecedented forms of agency.

This Techno-Renaissance will drive innovation in the music industry and bring about an intermingling of AI solutions and e-commerce brands. AI solutions, when used with e-commerce brands, will optimise supply chains and adjust prices in real time based on demand, competition, customer behaviour, and inventory levels.

E-commerce brands thrive by leveraging vast amounts of data to personalize shopping experiences, optimise marketing strategies, and forecast trends. The more data an e-commerce platform collects, the more precisely it can offer bespoke shopping experiences.

E-commerce platforms curate customer data through website interactions, buying patterns, and browsing behaviour. The data is used to personalize product recommendations, pricing, and marketing campaigns to cater to individual client preferences. By analysing client data, e-commerce brands target specific demographics with highly relevant advertisements across different platforms.

Machine learning algorithms search for patterns to predict future behaviour, allowing businesses to proactively stock inventory and optimise pricing. Data analytics allows the e-commerce brand to understand customer sentiment, pain points, and emerging trends. AI-driven e-commerce is not without intrinsic challenges.

E-commerce brands must ensure that customer data is handled responsibly. Brands must manage and maintain accurate and reliable data. The intermingling of AI and e-commerce brands will also change lives and livelihoods as the digital divide between the virtual and the real fades. Within a decade, automation will replace many known tasks as the work of nations becomes increasingly digital.

Many workers will resist AI for a variety of reasons, including concerns about job security, privacy, fear of the unknown, scepticism about the reliability of authority delegated to artificial artefacts, surveillance capitalism, and Deepfakes.

These disruptions will be immense and need to be scrutinized in the Global South and the poorer strata of society all over the world, including in Europe and North America. Lurking with stealth beneath these disruptions is a transference in the general features of reality, or our ontology.

Ontology examines the relationships among all things and their classification into particulars and universals. Particulars are unique, non-repeatable entities, like Peter Minshall, whereas universals are general repeatable entities, like the colour blue.

Another division occurs between concrete objects existing in space and time, like a couch, and abstract ideas existing outside space and time, like the numeral IV. Numbers are abstract concepts or ideas representing a quantity.

Arabic numerals like “4″ are symbols used to physically write down or represent that idea. A human may have “4” chairs and write with “4” pencils but is unable to point to, or point out, “four” in a pure state severed from actual concrete objects.

There are countless ways to organise data, including vocabularies, taxonomies, thesauri, topic maps, logical models and relational databases. Ontologies are unique because of their flexibility.

Ontologies are the “Lego” bricks of the semantic web. This outlook envisions the web as working with linked data rather than being a scattered tangle of https URLs pointing to one another.

In the Techno-Renaissance that is happening now, thinkers like Sir Tim Burners-Lee are advocating the idea that data should not solely exist in the form of hypertext documents and hyperlinks between them. Rather, data should be seen as what it represents, people, places, events, ideas, and activities, and linked in a human-readable way.

Ontologies are very pliable, and changing a property is as easy as changing the semantic concept that underpins that property. Ontologies are frameworks that help AI systems understand and interpret data.

They are a fundamental part of AI that help systems make decisions and reason. Ontologies are the digital knowledge maps that define how concepts relate to each other.

These maps help AI systems understand the relationships among e-commerce brands, services, and customer needs. Ontologies also help AI systems to make inferences based on content and relationships as they communicate with each other using standardized terminologies and relations.

Today, data ontologies are used in healthcare and financial systems. In healthcare, they help AI systems comprehend the relationships among symptoms, diseases, and treatments. In financial systems, ontologies help AI systems to navigate global markets, regulations, and economic indicators.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, these changes call for a creolized AI-discourse imbued with multicultural stamina and a decolonizing AI agenda to act as a scaffold strong enough to carry the weight of our existential challenges.