Editing Portal:Artificial Intelligence (section)

=== Ontologies and symbolic knowledge ===

Modern AI is not only neural networks. Ontologies, knowledge graphs, semantic categories, and formal relationships remain important in fields such as scientific data, robotics, bioinformatics, enterprise search, and reasoning systems.

The AI Perl Committee page describes a COWL API effort for accessing ontologies directly in Perl, based on the Cowl ontology library by the Polytechnic University of Bari.<ref>Perl Community Roadmap, “AI Perl Committee,” https://perlcommunity.org/ai/, accessed July 3, 2026.</ref> In this context, Perl’s role is again as an interface language: it can connect symbolic knowledge systems to files, databases, APIs, reports, and application logic.

This matters because LLMs alone do not solve every AI problem. Many real systems need explicit categories, relationships, constraints, provenance, and validation. Perl’s data-processing strengths make it a plausible language for moving between informal text and more formal knowledge structures.