Artificially generatedOntology: Four Primitives, and the Action Writes Back
Object, property, link, action. Then a workflow, a twin, and the question of why Palantir sends engineers into the company.
An ontology for a company has four primitives, not three. Objects are the nouns: customer, order, burger, branch. Properties are the fields: name, price, weight, status. Links are the relationships: order contains burger. Actions are the verbs that write back: process a payment, cut a price, put a product on the homepage. Without actions the model is a photo. With actions it becomes a system.
Without an action, it stays a photo.
Ontology, in the version a company can build, is the shared list of its things, fields, relationships, and allowed acts. Palantir names the same four in Foundry: object type, property, link type, action type. Foundry's shipped model, not Aristotle. An object type is the schema of a thing or an event. Airport, and then JFK and LHR as single objects. A property is a trait, name and country on LHR. A link type is the schema of a relationship, a link is one connection. An action type is a bundle of changes to objects, fields, and links, plus what happens on the side when someone fires the action. Only then may people, and later agents, change the objects.
The grain is pragmatic. If you want to track, count, or change the thing on its own, it is an object. The cucumber in the burger is an object if you track stock and delivery. Mustard is a property if you do not count it on its own. "Customer" means something else in sales, logistics, and assembly. The properties show where the language splits. The border between two objects is never natural. It is a decision, as in SEO between two keywords. Consistent beats perfect.
The same connection, two languages.
The same connection has two vocabularies. Subject, predicate, object comes from grammar. Berlin is the subject, "is capital of" the predicate, Germany the object. A triple is exactly that package. Object, relation, object is the graph view. Both are things. The difference is the role in the statement, not the kind of thing. "Works in" and "employs" are two directions of the same connection, but not the same predicate. Symmetric would be "is married to". In practice you store one direction and derive the other.
You draw it as a list and as a graph. Nodes are object types, edges are links, properties hang on the node as a list, actions as an annotation or a second table. Mermaid is enough for the structure. Actions need the notation extended, not shortened. Palantir's Ontology Manager combines graph and table. The first draft belongs on a whiteboard.
Five objects. Not the company yet.
The start, for an e-commerce merchant with one product type, two thousand variants, accessories, consultation, special freight, and in-house assembly, is a workflow, not the company. Consultation, order, shipping order, assembly order, invoice. The next branch comes only when this one runs. Whoever starts with the whole model dies of scope creep.
Below sits the first branch as a tool. Burger is the product. Mustard stays a field. The cucumber becomes an object the moment you want to count it on its own. Cut price writes back and asks, because money moves. The homepage has one slot and ten wants. You assign the slot.
Mini-ontology: one product type
Five order objects, one burger, one action that writes back. No whole model.
Objects
Cutting the price changes the number the next decision sits on. A gate, because money moves.
Ten agents want the homepage. The slot is one.
Burger
Decisions
The burger has fields. The cucumber becomes an object only when you count it. Price and homepage are actions with a gate.
1606, a diagram. 1993, a specification. Then the action.
The word is older than the software. In 1606, in St. Gallen, Jacob Lorhard puts the title Metaphysics, or Ontology, on the Ogdoas Scholastica. The book is almost only a diagram: terms as a tree, not as running text. Aristotle had already asked what kinds of things there are, substance and what hangs on it. Computer science takes the word up again in 1993. Thomas Gruber, eight words: "An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization." An explicit specification of what a system takes the world to be. Classes, relations, functions. So that two systems mean the same thing when they say "customer".
Out of that comes a language for the web. OWL has been a W3C recommendation since February 10, 2004. The Gene Ontology, as a paper in 2000, shows in biology what a shared list of terms does to a science: the same genes, the same words, across labs. The lesson for a company runs the other way. A local ontology lets a workflow run. An ontology of everything stays a research program.
Palantir puts the action on that line. In its own docs the Ontology is the digital twin of an organization: data sets and models, mapped onto object types, properties, link types, and action types. Philosophy had nouns and relationships. The action is the part that writes back into the data. The map becomes a system a person or an agent can operate.
Railroad Tycoon with real numbers.
The ontology is not the context. It is the translation layer. Raw data says "cucumber: 500". The model says the cucumber belongs to the burger that goes out tomorrow, and the lead time is three days. Out of that comes a decision. With ERP, warehouse, and marketing connected, an agent sees that three products are eating storage cost, and proposes putting them on the homepage and cutting the price. This is Railroad Tycoon with real numbers. Stocks, routes, prices, and one train that changes the next train. For everyone who loved companies as a game, that is the point: the company finally becomes a simulation, because its nouns and its allowed moves are on the table.
The catch is the feedback. The action changes the data it is based on. Without approval rules the loop runs away. The human does not sit on every small thing. The human sits on actions that move money, and on scarce resources. Ten agents want the homepage slot. One slot. A human assigns it. The same rule that approves the price assigns the slot. Whoever leaves both to the agents gets ten homepages and a price that undercuts itself.
That is why an ontology is the step on which economic evolution for agents has a board at all. A model without shared objects invents the customer anew on every call. A model with actions can play an operation, measure it, and correct it. The next step is this twin, not a bigger chat.
First the process. Then the agent. The margin is software.
Palantir stood itself on exactly this layer. Foundry is the ontology plus the pipelines that feed it. AIP sits on top: models that read objects and fire actions, with permissions, inside the operation and not as a chat beside the company. The person who brings that into the operation is called a Forward Deployed Software Engineer. Palantir itself, in a piece about the workday: the product engineer builds one capability for many customers. The Forward Deployed Software Engineer switches on many capabilities for one customer. Inside, the role is called Delta. The work is process mapping with write access. Which objects exist, which action is allowed, which workflow runs on Monday.
It looks like consulting, and the comparison is the right first question. Someone sits in the room, draws the flow, builds it in software, stays until it runs. A consultancy sells the hours. Palantir in the second quarter of 2026: revenue 1.94 billion dollars, up 93 percent on the year before, operating income 912 million, margin 47 percent. The adjusted operating margin, their own calculation, sits at 62 percent. Cash from operations in that quarter: 1.22 billion, 63 percent of revenue. Debt: none. Cash and short-term US Treasuries: 9.2 billion. Commercial 945 million, government 990 million. Of that, in the US, 764 million commercial, up 149 percent, and 809 million government. 1,049 customers. Alex Karp in the report on that quarter: "This quarter was otherworldly."
Our reading, after these numbers. The installation is a project that sets process and ontology in one pass and then lets agents run on it. The bill is software: the same platform, the next customer, a margin an hours firm does not have. The Forward Deployed Engineer is the expensive start, not the product they sell by the hour. Whether the start gets small someday, the margin does not say yet. It says the rest already scales. The jobs that come out of this sit in the list beside this piece.
The price pays the cash flow 132 times.
McGrinsey Ratio, officially Price-to-Cash-Flow: market cap on the date divided by the operating cash flow of the last four quarters. We did not invent the figure. The method. Among the hundred most expensive companies the median sat at 25. The series.
Operating cash flow, first half of 2025: 850 million dollars. Year 2025: 2.13 billion, of which the second half is 1.28. First half of 2026: 2.12 billion, of which 899 million in the first quarter and 1.22 billion in the second. The four quarters through June 30, 2026 are therefore 3.40 billion. On July 27, 2026, 2.403 billion shares were outstanding, Class A, B, and F together, from the 10-Q. Close on September 30, 2026: 187.05 dollars. Market value 449 billion. Ratio 132.
| Date | Price | Market value | Operating cash flow | McGrinsey Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 30, 2026 | 187.05 $ | 449 billion $ | 3.40 billion $, four quarters through June 30 | 132 |
The cash flow is earned. The report shows no financial debt. In the first half of 2026, 467 million dollars of stock-based compensation sits in the reconciliation. It dilutes. It does not leave the cash account. Ratio 132 is the price for a company whose cash is already there and whose share price prices in more years at this pace. That is our view after the number.
The company's guide in the release of August 3, 2026: 8.15 to 8.16 billion dollars of revenue for the full year. The denominator of the ratio stays the cash flow through June 30.
Quarterly release, August 3, 2026 · 10-Q, second quarter 2026 · Closing prices
The word, four primitives, 132.
| Statement | Basket | From |
|---|---|---|
| Four building blocks in Foundry: object type, property, link type, action type. The Ontology there is the digital twin of an organization. | Fact | Palantir, Core concepts, docs. |
| Lorhard, Ogdoas Scholastica, St. Gallen 1606, first printed Ontologia, almost only diagrams. | Fact | Barry Smith, The Birth of Ontology, 2022. Øhrstrøm, Schärfe, Uckelman. |
| "An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization." | Fact | Thomas Gruber, Knowledge Acquisition, 1993. |
| OWL, W3C Recommendation, February 10, 2004. | Fact | W3C. |
| Q2 2026: revenue 1.94 billion, operating income 912 million, margin 47 percent. Cash from operations 1.22 billion. No debt. 9.2 billion cash and short-term Treasuries. Commercial 945, government 990 million. Of that, US commercial 764, up 149 percent, and US government 809. | Fact | Release of August 3, 2026. Segment figures from the earnings call of the same quarter. |
| Shares on July 27, 2026: 2.403 billion, all classes. Close September 30: 187.05 dollars. Market value 449 billion. Operating cash flow of the four quarters through June 30: 3.40 billion. Ratio 132. | Fact | 10-Q for the share count. Yahoo Finance for the close. Year 2025: 2.134 billion operating cash flow. First half 2026: 2.115 billion. |
| The installation is project work, the bill is software. The Forward Deployed Engineer is the start, not the hourly product. | Hypothesis | Our reading after margin, debt, and the role as described. |
| Ten agents, one homepage slot. The human sits on money and on scarce resources. | Hypothesis | The gate this piece proposes. |
- Palantir, Ontology, core conceptsObject type, property, link type, action type. Digital twin of the organization.https://palantir.com/docs/foundry/ontology/core-concepts
- Thomas Gruber, 1993A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications. Knowledge Acquisition 5(2).https://tomgruber.org/writing/ontolingua-kaj-1993/
- Jacob Lorhard, 1606Ogdoas Scholastica. First printed Ontologia. Barry Smith, The Birth of Ontology, 2022.https://www.ontology.co/jacob-lorhard.htm
- W3C, OWL, February 10, 2004OWL Web Ontology Language Guide, Recommendation.https://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-features-20040210/
- Gene Ontology, 2000Ashburner et al., Nature Genetics. Shared vocabulary in biology.https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10802651/
- Forward Deployed Software EngineerOne capability, many customers. Many capabilities, one customer. Inside, Delta.https://blog.palantir.com/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-palantir-forward-deployed-software-engineer-45ef2de257b1
- Quarterly release, August 3, 2026Revenue, operating income, cash flow, Karp, guide.https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000132165526000039/a2026q2ex991pressrelease.htm
- Release, US splitUS 1.573 billion. Of that, commercial 764, government 809.https://www.stocktitan.net/news/PLTR/palantir-reports-q2-2026-u-s-comm-revenue-growth-of-149-y-y-and-c8762wptyyap.html
- Earnings call, second quarter 2026Commercial 945 million, government 990 million.https://ca.investing.com/news/transcripts/earnings-call-transcript-palantir-tops-q2-2026-forecasts-shares-jump-after-hours-93CH-4772308
- Year 2025, operating cash flow2.134 billion dollars, net cash provided by operating activities.https://www.stocktitan.net/news/PLTR/palantir-reports-q4-2025-u-s-comm-revenue-growth-of-137-y-y-and-rjr7pu36nubw.html
- 10-Q, quarter through June 30, 2026Share counts as of July 27, 2026. Cash flow of the half year.https://investors.palantir.com/files/2026%20Q2%20PLTR%2010-Q.pdf
- New jobsOntology Engineer, Prompt Reviewer, Forward Deployed Engineer. The list beside this piece.https://mcgrinsey.com/magazin/ontology-engineer-new-jobs/
- McGrinsey RatioMarket value divided by the operating cash flow of the last four quarters.https://mcgrinsey.com/magazin/mcgrinsey-ratio-kgv-wachstumskapital/
Research: October 1, 2026. Palantir did not commission us.
