Digital Ontology: The Quest to a Better Metaverse for Business
Warren Buffett believes the most important thing is trying to find a business with a wide and long-lasting moat around it! What if the “moat” in the future is the metaverse?
A new paradigm focused on unlocking insights and mapping connected relationships between people, companies and the environment is developing all over the world. Gaining a better understanding of the key contributors and influencers who must be considered when looking to achieve better results in business as well as to maintain and protect our environment has never been more important than it is today.
The metaverse (US$ 758.6 Billion Market by 2030 – ResearchAndMarkets) has further accelerated the need for these complex connected relationships to be mapped into a form of digital ontology (the concept of connecting things and their relationships). This ontology allows us to identify and link people, businesses, events, products and services across the physical, online and metaverse (virtual worlds) with confidence that we can cross-sell related products, services or NFTs (cryptographic assets on a blockchain) more successfully.
As the world continues to digitize and become more connected, those businesses that have already started mapping out emerging ontological concepts into an expansive structure across consumers’ physical, online and metaverse will have a first-mover advantage or a wide and long-lasting moat around it. These businesses can begin answering tough questions related specifically to their industry for example:
- Which metaverse avatars can be identified as new or existing customers in order to sell, cross-sell related products or services?
- What is their virtual and online physical demographic profile, psychographic and geographic distribution?
- Who are their metaverse connections? Do they share the same interests?
- Where across the several virtual worlds inside the metaverse, do these avatars/user identities engage in a wide range of activities?
- Which avatars are key influencers in the metaverse? Are they key influencers online too?
- What is the most popular metaverse virtual currency that people are using today to purchase virtual goods? How can we enable alternate digital payments (Bitcoin, Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, etc)?
- What are the challenges in building a digital ontology database of our customers for our business? Do we have a roadmap in place for integrating into the metaverse?
- How does digital ontology in the metaverse differ from other ontologies used for physical and online information extraction?
- Does localization play a role in developing and designing our products, everything from content to user experience and visual design in the metaverse? What about cultural, contextual and linguistic factors when it comes down to creating localized solutions that connect with our audience more effectively?
- How will the major metaverse platforms (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) be managed in the future? How can we ensure cross-platform interoperability between metaverse platforms?
While there are some proprietary collaboration tools and systems that were initially built with the metaverse in mind, they have yet to be utilized at a much larger scale. In fact, they are missing numerous components and/or have not been optimized fully for the future of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) – tools that will allow businesses to store and piece together data and insights in many different ways. These applications would then allow companies to create VR content or market services and products intended for the metaverse, though in order to encourage business growth and profits, the platform itself will likely need an open-source framework to function globally. We also know that there is an opportunity to use digital ontologies to address issues like privacy, security, trust and data.
One thing is certain: even though several questions can seem impossible to answer at the moment but if we cannot identify the specifics in our realm of work on a deeper level, we can’t fully understand ourselves or the role others play in it. We may not know how to explain those connections right away, but it does give us a good starting point for diving into them more deeply and discovering some crucial trends. Those trends could be used to develop hypotheses about how we want our organizations to grow and evolve over time inside our own little corner of the metaverse.
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