
Knowledge Graphs
Tracking the historical events that lead to the interweaving of data and knowledge.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
—George Santayana
This is the case with the notion of Knowledge Graphs. In 2012, Google announced a product called the Google Knowledge Graph. Old ideas achieved worldwide popularity as technical limitations were overcome and it was adopted by large companies. In parallel, other types of “Graph” services were developed, as witnessed by similar ideas by other giants like Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Ebay. Later, myriad companies and organizations started to use the Knowledge Graph keyword to refer to the integration of data, given rise to entities and relations forming graphs. Academia began to adopt this keyword to loosely designate systems that integrate data with some structure of graphs, a reincarnation of the Semantic Web, and Linked Data. In fact, today the notion of Knowledge Graph can be considered, more than a precise notion or system, an evolving project and a vision.
The ongoing area of Knowledge Graphs represents in this sense a convergence of data and knowledge techniques around the old notion of graphs or networks.
—CACM, “Knowledge Graphs”
In knowledge representation and reasoning, knowledge graph is a knowledge base that uses a graph-structured data model or topology to integrate data. Knowledge graphs are often used to store interlinked descriptions of entities – objects, events, situations or abstract concepts – while also encoding the semantics underlying the used terminology.
Since the development of the Semantic Web, knowledge graphs are often associated with linked open data projects, focusing on the connections between concepts and entities. They are also prominently associated with and used by search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo; knowledge-engines and question-answering services such as WolframAlpha, Apple’s Siri, and Amazon Alexa; and social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
—Wikipedia, “Knowledge graph“
Tracking the historical events that lead to the interweaving of data and knowledge.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
—George Santayana