Is there anyone out there who has tried linking named entities with an ontology? All I've seen is research but I'm curious if anyone's done any practical work in this area. Even if it was a narrowly-scoped ontology it might be pretty interesting.
There's a number of tools that do entity linking (that's the phrase you're looking for), including some open source ones.
We've evaluated and used quite a few over the years: there's Dexter [0] by Diego Ceccarelli, Semanticizer by UvA [1] and DBpedia Spotlight [2] and a few others. We've used them for various linking tasks, such as detecting "work skills" in plain text (HR domain) or detecting drug names (medical domain).
The amount to which these tools allow "customization" (ease of plugging in your own ontology, support for input format and disambiguation signals) differs. Either way, even though this research includes open source code, the code is more of the "research prototype" kind. Don't expect a plug&play optimized production tool.
At datamaran [1] we do some of that stuff for assessing non-financial risks with our internal ontology. Also, we are using spaCy and trying out prodigy. Send me an email and I can put you in contact with one of our NLP scientists if you want (they're planning on releasing a paper somewhere soon btw).
That's definitely deployed in production, e.g. to link entities to a summary page in news articles, or in information extraction systems.
In practice it's very driven by information retrieval, especially the coverage of the synonym list provided in the ontology. Relevance scores for each ontology entry are also super important.
Disambiguation is getting better with neural networks, but it's still really hard. If you have two entities matching for some text, picking the most frequent one gives you a very strong baseline.
