> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://netter.ai/docs/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Ontology

> The ontology is your company-level business object model—entities, properties, and relationships built on top of the data your pipelines produce.

The **ontology** turns raw project databases into shared business objects. Where a pipeline produces a table (`customers.parquet`), the ontology promotes that table to a typed **entity** (`Customer`) with named **properties**, **relationships** to other entities, and a stable identity that the rest of the platform (apps, dashboards, queries) can rely on.

## Concepts

| Concept          | What it is                                                                                                               |
| ---------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| **Entity**       | A business object type (Customer, Invoice, Ticket). Backed by one project database.                                      |
| **Property**     | A typed column on an entity (name, email, amount).                                                                       |
| **Relationship** | A directional link between two entities (Customer → Invoice).                                                            |
| **Row overlay**  | An admin-authored edit applied on top of the source data—insert, update, or delete a row without rewriting the pipeline. |

Entities are **company-scoped**: one ontology per company, shared across all projects.

## How it relates to pipelines

A pipeline writes rows into a project **database** via a `data_sink` step. That database can stay as raw data, or you can **promote** it to an entity. Promoting locks in a primary key, exposes the table to apps and dashboards, and unblocks row-level editing.

See [Promote a database](/docs/ontology/promote-data).

## What viewers see

Viewers can browse entities, inspect related records (Customer → their Invoices), and run natural-language queries. They cannot create or modify entities, properties, or relationships—those operations are admin/owner only.

## Next steps

* [Promote a database](/docs/ontology/promote-data) into an entity.
* [Edit rows](/docs/ontology/edit-rows) via overlays without touching the pipeline.
* Govern writes with [Actions](/docs/ontology/actions)—the named, permissioned operations apps and automations use.
* [Query in natural language](/docs/ontology/query) against the entity graph.