Ontology is the nouns and verbs of how your business actually runs.
Every home services business runs on a web of interconnected relationships - jobs, customers, technicians, calls, invoices - moving and changing every hour. An ontology is the layer that encodes those relationships into a shared model: the ground truth of how your business is actually operating. It's the difference between a company that runs on assumptions scattered across fifteen systems, and a company that runs on a single, shared definition of itself.
01The concept
Great decisions require three things. The ontology encodes all of them.
01 — Data
Data.
The current state of your business. Every job, customer, technician, invoice, and call from every system, resolved into a single set of objects with shared definitions.
02 — Logic
Logic.
How your business thinks about those objects. The rules — how margin is calculated, how a callback is defined, how a lead becomes a job — modeled so every tool and every agent applies them the same way.
03 — Actions
Actions.
What your business does about it. Dispatching, pricing, reordering, escalating. The ontology models the decisions a business takes so AI and humans can take those decisions inside the same system.
02Why home services
Generic ontologies don't know what a callback costs you.
The AI tools sold into home services promise to make your business smarter. They can't. The data underneath them is fragmented, contradictory, and shaped for someone else's industry. We didn't start from a blank slate - the IgniteIQ ontology was built next to operators, inside the trucks, on the dispatch board, in the books, and shaped specifically for the economics of HVAC, electrical, plumbing, and the rest of the trades.
01
The economics are unit-based.
Margin per job. Cost per lead. Revenue per technician hour. The ontology is wired to the unit economics that actually matter — not adapted from retail or SaaS.
02
The data is messy and operational.
Field-typed by techs. Reconciled across CRM, dispatch, accounting. The ontology resolves naming, ID, and timing conflicts that would crash a generic model.
03
The decisions repeat across operators.
The 12 core entities — Job, Lead, Customer, Technician, Invoice, Equipment, Channel, Call, Dispatch, Payment, Inventory, Membership — are the operational DNA of every home services business.
04The 12 core entities
A home services business isn't simple. The ontology makes it usable.
A single mid-size operator runs on hundreds of distinct object types, thousands of relationships, and dozens of source systems that don't agree on what any of them mean. The IgniteIQ ontology resolves all of it — into a model that's queryable, governable, and built to compound as your business grows.
200+
Object types
5,000+
Relationships
25+
Source systems
Continuous
Resolution
01
One customer, not four.
The same homeowner might exist as four different records across CRM, dispatch, billing, and call tracking. The ontology resolves them into a single customer object — with one history, one value, one definition.
02
One job, across every system.
A "job" in ServiceTitan is not the same as a "job" in your accounting system or your marketing platform. The ontology reconciles every source into one job object, so every tool downstream — analytics, dispatch, AI agents — speaks the same language.
03
One technician, with full context.
Dispatch knows their schedule. Payroll knows their hours. Certifications live somewhere else entirely. The ontology rolls them into one technician object that every part of the business can query.
The point
What looks like fifteen disconnected systems on the surface is one business underneath. The ontology is the layer where it finally acts like one.
05How it deploys
The ontology ships into your warehouse as code.
The IgniteIQ ontology deploys directly into your cloud account — Snowflake, BigQuery, or Databricks — and resolves your operational data in seven days. Every framework update flows back to every operator on the platform, so the ontology gets sharper every month without a re-implementation. Versioned. Auditable. In your warehouse, not ours.
Versioned code
Ships as
Your warehouse
Lives in
< 7 days
Time to live
Continuous
Updates
Get started today
Get started today
Own Your Intelligence.
Your cloud. Your data. Your Intelligence. Deployed in days, not months - and yours from the moment we ship.