Ontologist - Insurance Domain in City of Westminster

We are building a canonical insurance ontology that spans policy, coverage, underwriting, claims, and product taxonomy - intended to serve as the semantic backbone across our data platforms, AI applications, and regulatory reporting.

You will own the vocabulary: designing, extending, and governing OWL/RDF ontologies that give every downstream system a shared, machine-readable understanding of what Chubb's insurance concepts mean.

This is a hands-on engineering role, not a purely theoretical one.

You will work in JSON-LD and Turtle daily, collaborate with product SMEs to capture domain semantics correctly, and apply formal upper ontologies (gist, PROV-O) to anchor Chubb's terms to open standards.

What You Will Do

• Design and extend the Chubb insurance ontology - classes, properties, named individuals - across lines of business: property & casualty, management liability, professional indemnity, specialty, consumer insurance products and reinsurance.
• Drive vocabulary governance: establish and enforce naming conventions, cardinality rules, namespace strategy, and deprecation policies as the ontology grows.
• Translate SME knowledge into formal axioms: interview underwriters, product managers, actuaries, and claims handlers; convert their business definitions into rdfs: comment, skos: definition, and OWL restrictions.
• Map source schemas to ontology: analyze source system data dictionaries (SQL DDL, Excel, XML/XSD) and produce mappings with rationale - the handoff artefact that drives engineering implementation.
• Collaborate with the data engineering and AI teams to ensure ontology terms are consumable in knowledge graphs, LLM RAG pipelines, and BI semantic layers.
• Maintain provenance and audit trails using PROV-O: every term addition records its rationald it, and the SME who approved it.
• Run validation gates before each ontology release: naming conformance checks, annotation completeness, IRI stability, and backward-compatibility review.
• Contribute to tooling: improve the ontology SDLC pipeline (mapping validators, visualisers, ongside the engineering team.
• 4+ years of hands-on ontology engineering using OWL 2, RDF, RDFS, and SPARQL.
• Proficiency in at least one serialization format: JSON-LD, Turtle, or RDF/XML - JSON-LD pre
• Experience mapping source data schemas (any format) to ontology terms and articulating the design decisions behind each choice.
• Familiarity with at least one upper or mid-level ontology: gist, FIBO, BFO, PROV-O, Dublin
• Ability to communicate ontology decisions in plain business language - you will present to underwriters, not only to engineers.
• Strong written skills: every term you MINT needs a clear, non-circular rdfs: comment
• Preferred
• Insurance domain knowledge - commercial and consumer insurance products
• Experience with FIBO (Financial Industry Business Ontology) or ACORD data standards and the underlying data models.
• Knowledge of SHACL for ontology constraint validation.
• Familiarity with provenance capture patterns (PROV-O Activities, Entities, Agents).
• Experience building or governing ontologies used in AI/knowledge graph/RAG contexts.
• #J-18808-Ljbffr