Generative Ontology Induction: Domain-Agnostic Schema Discovery from Document Corpora Using Large Language Models

Ontology engineering remains a critical bottleneck in knowledge-intensive AI systems. Existing automated approaches either depend on predefined schemas, operate within narrow domains, or produce unstructured outputs unsuitable for downstream pipelines.
We introduce Generative Ontology Induction (GOI), a domain-agnostic framework that induces a generative blueprint - entities, dimensions, properties, relationships, and constraints - from a corpus of examples and exports it as a typed graph (six node types, seven edge types) in YAML/JSON. We introduce the Node Coverage Score, a novel evaluation metric that measures the fraction of structural ontology nodes (classes, properties, and dimensions) appearing in generated outputs.
A controlled generative validation on four contrasting ontologies - a familiar Software Services Invoice schema, a custom Job Description Ontology, a confidential Pain-Management Clinical Visit Record Ontology, and a Professional Services Contract & Statement of Work Ontology - shows that GOI-prompted generation covers 95-100% of the structural backbone in every case; a generic three-field template holds at 97.8% on the invoice schema but drops to 52.2% on the Job Description Ontology, 62.2% on the Pain-Management ontology, and 78.3% on the Professional Services Contract ontology. The structural coverage holds regardless of how familiar the document type is to the model.