Semantic Forge
Expertise in ontological reasoning, put to work on business data.
Semantic Forge Limited is a UK company that develops the Smart Semantic Layer.
Thirty years of software, a decade of ontologies.
Graham has more than 30 years of experience in software development across a variety of industries, including games and entertainment, and was part of the core bid team for Camelot's successful bid for the 10-year National Lottery licence.
He then returned to academia to follow his interest in formal knowledge representation for business use.
Graham completed his PhD at Imperial College London in 2016 in the Structured and Probabilistic Intelligent Knowledge Engineering (SPIKE) group under the supervision of Dr Krysia Broda and Professor Alessandra Russo, researching novel methods for ontological reasoning in the presence of inconsistencies. A short paper introducing this work is available at LPAR 20: Reasoning in the presence of inconsistency through Preferential ALC.
He was involved in teaching throughout his PhD, completing a PGCert in University Learning and Teaching in 2014 and teaching both undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
On leaving academia he founded Semantic Forge Limited, where he continues to focus on the challenge of creating rich extensions to the OWL RL language that enable an expressive mapping to answer complex business queries, including aggregation.
From formal knowledge representation to a semantic layer for AI.
Semantic Forge was founded by Dr Graham Deane, drawing on his expertise in ontologies and automated reasoning, to develop semantic tools that let organisations of any size build a documented, connected model of their data.
That work became the Smart Semantic Layer. It generates an OWL ontology directly from an organisation's databases, adds its business vocabulary, and allows queries across systems in business terms, without SQL and without moving data.
The arrival of large language models has made that foundation more valuable. AI assistants are fluent, but they can't reliably interpret business databases on their own. A formal, reasoned model of the business is exactly what they need to find the right data. Our MCP server gives AI agents access to it without exposing the organisation's data to the LLM or agent.
Model-agnostic. Organisations are free to use any closed or open language model.
Standards-based semantics, grounded in formal logic.
The Smart Semantic Layer is built on W3C OWL ontologies and OWL RL reasoning with data extensions. Reasoning infers how concepts relate across sources, so a question about customers and sales can be answered even when that information is spread across several systems.
Queries are written as description logic expressions in OWL Manchester syntax, readable by people as well as machines. Every answer can be traced to the concepts and query that produced it.
- Founder holds a PhD in ontological reasoning from Imperial College London
- OWL ontology generated automatically from database sources
- OWL RL reasoning with data extensions
- Description logic queries in Manchester syntax
- Ontology-based data access across multiple database types
- Browser-based interface with a full security model: group permissions and audit history
- MCP server, with a working natural-language assistant
- Hand-written code, not AI-generated, with regular security reviews by AI tools
Semantic Forge Limited
Registered address
3 Parkfield Road
London NW10 2BJ
United Kingdom
Registration
Company number 06813994
VAT number 381559176