Accelerate ontology adoption with out-of-the-box industry templates

[cvishwakarm]

Problem

When customers open Fabric ontology for the first time, they face a blank canvas. They have to design entity types, properties, relationships, and naming conventions from scratch — often without a clear reference for what "good" looks like in their domain. This design phase alone can take weeks of workshops before any technical work begins.

For most enterprises, the patterns are well-known — a retail ontology has Customer, Product, Order, Store, Inventory; a manufacturing ontology has Asset, WorkOrder, Site, Material. Customers are reinventing the same models, slowly and inconsistently.

What would help

Ship a starter library of sample / template ontologies for common industry domains:

• Retail
• Manufacturing
• Supply Chain
• Financial Services
• Healthcare
• Sustainability / ESG
• HR / Workforce
• Sales / B2B

Even read-only reference templates (entity types, properties, relationships, sample queries) would be valuable. Importable starter ontologies that customers can instantiate and then bind to their own data would be even better. Microsoft already has this domain expertise through Common Data Model, Dynamics 365 industry data models, and Industry Clouds — extending those into Fabric IQ would be a natural fit.

Why it matters

• Removes the "blank canvas" problem and shortens design time from weeks to hours
• Provides Microsoft-validated patterns customers can trust
• Accelerates Fabric IQ and data agent adoption — a templated ontology plus Copilot can produce a working agent in a day

Impact

Templates lower the barrier to entry for ontology, especially for customers who know their data but aren't sure how to model it semantically. Combined with stronger creation paths (automation from lakehouse), this would make Fabric IQ approachable for any enterprise, not just those with existing semantic modeling expertise.

[YSD]

Thanks for your input! Are you familiar with the Ontology playground? https://aka.ms/ontology-playground

[ThornKevin]

Would love to see this adopted as Business Process Solutions Template! As we are an Manufacturing Company, I would love to have more ootb features available, especially to e.g. map my Azure IoT Operations Data, without reinventing the weel

[YSD]

Ok thanks for your input, I have assigned the team with your request.

[ThornKevin]

That sounds great, thank you! My CIO loves the Idea of Fabric Business Process Solutions and want it to grow in functionality (more within Fabric UI and less through yet-another-website). One painful example where we are lacking OOTB-Features in general, is to report the usage of Microsoft Products itself. Right now we use Python Notebooks, PowerQueries and MLVs to extract all EntraID Users, their License assignments, their relationship to departments or internal digitalization clusters, enrich it by the actual usage of the tool, by region and country. And in some cases further enrich it by the process-time needed to get access to such a license, or amount of IT-Tickets in that area to troubleshoot issues; correlated with Microsoft’s 365 Health Issue API Events. Looking on this diverse set of Microsoft data sources and the fact, that Microsoft controls most of the relationships between them, this would be a great opportunity to use Fabric Ontologies.