Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog

From insight to action: Bringing Fabric Activator into Ontology with Rules

With the introduction of Rules in Ontology, Fabric IQ takes a step forward in connecting business operations to real-time action by integrating Fabric Activator directly into Ontology. Fabric IQ brings context to your data. Activator in Fabric IQ operationalizes your ontology.

What are Ontology Rules with Fabric Activator?

Ontology Rules let you define conditions and actions on top of your business entities, rather than on raw tables or telemetry streams.

These rules are evaluated using Fabric Activator, which monitors and triggers actions when conditions are met. The unique value is that the rule logic is expressed in the language of your business, using ontology entities and properties.

  • Ontology defines what things mean (entities, relationships, context).
  • Activator handles when something matters, what should happen.

Why this matters

Business logic, not technical plumbing

Instead of hard-coding thresholds into pipelines or writing one-off stream queries, teams can define rules against business concepts like Customer, Order, or Device, making logic easier to understand, govern, and evolve.

Consistent meaning across analytics, AI, and operations

Because rules are grounded in Ontology, the same definitions used for AI agents like Fabric Data agents

A Real-World Scenario: Cold-chain monitoring for retail operations

A retailer models its business in Ontology with entities like:

  • Store
  • Freezer
  • Product
  • SaleEvent

Using Ontology Rules, the team defines a rule such as “When a freezer’s temperature exceeds safe limits for a sustained period, trigger an email”. The rule is defined in business terms and enforced in real time.

Screenshot of rule panel to Add rule to an Entity type

Figure: Add rule to an Entity type.

Ontology Rules represent an important evolution of Fabric IQ from understanding the business to running it intelligently. This is foundational for the next wave of AI-powered operations, where agents and systems act based on what the business intends.

You can read more about this at the rules documentation page.

Learn more

Engage

Related blog posts

From insight to action: Bringing Fabric Activator into Ontology with Rules

March 24, 2026 by Chafia Aouissi

If you haven’t already, check out Arun Ulag’s hero blog “FabCon and SQLCon 2026: Unifying databases and Fabric on a single, complete platform” for a complete look at all of our FabCon and SQLCon announcements across both Fabric and our database offerings.  Since introducing Fabric IQ, we’ve seen growing momentum around how organizations are using … Continue reading “What’s next for Fabric IQ Ontology: The operational context that powers your AI agents (Preview)”

March 23, 2026 by Will Wang["wawng"]

As enterprises’ use of large language models (LLMs) evolve from generating text to driving decisions, the path to the answer has come to matter as much as the answer itself. Enterprises are moving beyond AI that merely generates responses toward systems for that reason, justify, and allow for inspection. This shift drives the need for AI that can ground explanations in each enterprise’s complex information environment, which requires the system to perform explicit reasoning over organizational, transactional, and behavioral relationships.