04 — What we do together

We don't build your knowledge layer for you. We build it with your specialists.

Neo Gens is an advisory and design practice, not a systems vendor. Every engagement runs as a joint team: your curators, subject librarians, cataloguers, archivists and systems staff alongside our ontologists and knowledge engineers.

The reason is practical, not diplomatic. The knowledge worth modelling is in your people, not in your documents — and an ontology built by an outside firm alone is one your institution will neither trust nor maintain.

Service 01

Collection & holdings assessment

Run together before anything is built: what does the institution actually know, where is it held, and which questions can't currently be asked of it?

  • Your team brings the enquiries that keep failing; we bring the method
  • Where knowledge sits outside the collections system entirely
  • Which of it is at risk of leaving with a retirement
Service 02

Mission-driven ontology design

Working sessions where your specialists define meaning and we make it rigorous and shared. Built from your existing vocabularies, not over them.

  • Your authority files and controlled vocabularies are the starting material
  • One model across departments that catalogue differently and always have
  • Governance your team runs: who owns a definition, how it changes
Service 03

Knowledge & context graph

The ontology made real, built beside your systems staff so they know every design decision from the inside — not from a handover document.

  • Records reconciled — one person, not nine name variants
  • Objects, people, places, events and documents in one traversable network
  • Provenance carried on every statement, by design rather than convention
Service 04

Grounded AI, and the capability to run it

AI reasoning over your graph, inside your boundary, bound by your evidentiary rules — and your team trained to extend it after we've gone.

  • Deployed on your infrastructure or your own tenancy
  • Answers reproducible and citable, for staff enquiries or visitor-facing use
  • Your team adds the next collection without calling us
Your team brings
  • The curatorial, subject and cataloguing knowledge — nobody outside has it
  • Authority to settle terminology across departments
  • Systems staff who will own the graph afterwards
  • A director-level sponsor and one enquiry worth answering
We bring
  • Ontology and knowledge-graph design discipline
  • A method for turning specialist judgement into an explicit model
  • The claim, evidence and status rules that keep AI honest on top of it
  • Structured transfer, so the capability stays inside the institution
08 — Start the conversation

If this is close to what you have been thinking, let's find a time.

90 minutes. Bring your curators or librarians, and one question your institution couldn't answer.

Received. We'll reply within two business days to find a time.

Or write directly — hello@neogens.co

Previous
03 · What leadership looks like
Next
Engagement