Semantic Architect - Ontology Expert (RDF/OWL, SHACL, YARRRML)

Role Summary
You will play the role of a semantic architect behind our AI‑powered Knowledge Graph supporting flavor and beverage innovation. This role is responsible for designing ontologies, SHACL validation frameworks, and YARRRML mapping rules that enable structured, high‑quality, machine‑interpretable R&D knowledge. Working closely with flavor scientists, product developers, data engineers, and AI teams, the Ontologist will translate complex scientific concepts into formal knowledge models, maintain consistent terminology and synonyms across domains, and ensure that all R&D data can be integrated, reasoned over, and leveraged for advanced discovery and formulation insights. This position is central to accelerating innovation, improving knowledge reuse, and enabling next‑generation intelligent tools for the R&D organization.

Key Responsibilities

1.Ontology Design & Semantic Modeling
Work with business stakeholders to identify and maintain a set of competency questions that the ontology must support.
Design, extend, and maintain ontologies covering ingredients, flavors, sensory attributes, formulations, human trials, regulatory concepts, and experimental processes.
Perform conceptual modeling with domain experts and translate concepts into formal RDF/OWL semantics.
2. SHACL Constraint and Validation Framework
Develop and maintain SHACL shapes to enforce data quality, structural validity, consistency rules, and business constraints across the Knowledge Graph.
Collaborate with data engineers to validate incoming data streams using SHACL rules and produce validation reports.
3. YARRRML & Semantic Mapping Design
Design and maintain YARRRML mapping rules to transform heterogeneous R&D datasets into RDF/Knowledge Graph structures.
Work with data engineering teams to operationalize RML/YARRRML pipelines within ingestion workflows.
4. Knowledge Graph Integration & Reasoning
Collaborate with the development team to integrate ontologies into reasoning engines, entity extraction workflows, and semantic search pipelines.
Support entity alignment, relationship modeling, and enrichment algorithms that drive flavor discovery.
5. Synonym, Terminology & Vocabulary Management
Build and maintain synonym dictionaries, alternative labels, multilingual terms, and context-specific vocabulary used by flavorists and product developers.
Ensure synonym management is consistently reflected across ontologies, SHACL shapes, and mapping rules.
Facilitate terminology alignment workshops with subject matter experts.
6. Governance, Versioning & Documentation
Establish and maintain ontology governance including version control, documentation, and change-management workflows.
Maintain high-quality documentation, competency questions, term definitions, and modeling rationales.
Required Qualification

Proven experience with RDF, RDFS, OWL, and SPARQL.
Hands-on work with ontology editors (e.g., Protégé, TopBraid Composer).
Strong understanding of SHACL, RML/YARRRML, or equivalent mapping frameworks.
Experience in semantic modeling and conceptual data design.
Experience in food science, chemistry, sensory science, or CPG R&D domains.

Preferred Qualifications

Degree in Knowledge Engineering, Information Science, Semantic Technologies, Computational Linguistics, or related fields.
Knowledge of industry ontologies or semantic standards (e.g., SKOS, SAREF, DOLCE, IOF).
Familiarity with graph databases (e.g., Neo4j, GraphDB, Stardog) and knowledge-graph architectures.