The Rise of KNOWLEDGE GRAPHS
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THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES The Rise of KNOWLEDGE GRAPHS 2019 | MAR THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES | March 2019 2 MAKING NEW CONNECTIONS WITH KNOWLEDGE GRAPHS In today’s business world, time-to-insight and time-to-action are critical competitive differentiators. The demand for quick, easy access to information is growing. However, the challenge of combining data into meaningful information is also mounting—alongside the proliferation of data sources and types. While companies nowadays are investing heavily in initiatives to increase the amount of data at their disposal, most are spending more time finding than analyzing data. Data silos remain a huge problem at many enterprises, and legacy data management technologies and processes are having trouble keeping up with the speed, scalability, and flexibility requirements of new workloads and use cases. Data volumes are exploding in will be driven by specific applications Graph databases, a type of NoSQL organizations and the pressure to exploit and increasing expertise. “NoSQL” data database that employs structures that data for faster time to insight is management approaches, features, and with nodes, edges, and properties to increasing. Along with this store data and places data growth, there is a new a heavy emphasis wave of tools to expand The ability for knowledge graphs to gather on relationships, are what is possible with the growing in use. More proliferation of data and information, relationships, and insights—and recently, the term data types. connect those facts—allows organizations to “knowledge graph” While relational databases in particular has are still both the biggest discern context in data, which is important for gained popularity with source of transactional as well as complying with the introduction of data in most organizations extracting value several high-profile and the greatest source of increasingly stringent data privacy regulations. implementations by growth for transactional tech giants. data, according to a recent The ability for Unisphere Research study (“Emerging functionality vary widely and in many knowledge graphs to gather information, Alternatives for Data Management” situations, can provide an attractive relationships, and insights—and connect sponsored by AWS), the use of NoSQL is and effective solution for non-relational those facts—allows organizations to an emerging trend—the growth of which workloads. discern context in data, which is THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES | March 2019 3 important for extracting value as well as complying with increasingly stringent data privacy regulations. Moreover, The use of knowledge graphs spans fields such as with the use of AI expanding across healthcare, life sciences, financial services, intelligence, enterprises in all industries, knowledge graphs offer the potential to improve telecommunications, and other fields to support fraud real-time insights and support machine learning. detection, recommendation engines, master data management and Customer 360 views, identity and THE RISE OF KNOWLEDGE GRAPHS There are many factors contributing to access management, and data compliance for the expansion of technologies that allow regulatory standards, and other initiatives. people and machines to better understand connections in their datasets so decisions can be made faster. In particular, the ability to combine semantic and graph technologies that process data with contextual and conceptual intelligence is valued since it can enable predictive analytics that can help support better, real- explains analyst Amy Stapleton in an advisor, Radiant Advisors, discusses the time decisions. Opus Research article. “An IA [intelligent transformation underway as companies The concept of the enterprise knowledge assistant] that taps into an EKG can infer increasingly realize the power of data, and graph is made possible by machine learning the context and intent of questions, generate the tools and technologies helping them to and big data technologies, including direct answers, make recommendations, and expand what is possible. “I think in the next automated text analytics and graph engines, automatically expand its understanding as year [2019], we will see more sophistication the knowledge graph adds new content,” around data lake management. An exciting she noted. area that we are keeping an eye on is The use of knowledge graphs the role of the graph databases to apply spans fields such as healthcare, management to the data. We see some early life sciences, financial traction there with the use of the property services, intelligence, graph or the knowledge graph to relate telecommunications, everything to the data lake.” and more to improve Gartner also recently identified the usability of data knowledge graphs as a key new technology lakes, and support in both its Hype Cycle for Artificial fraud detection, Intelligence and Hype Cycle for Emerging recommendation Technologies. Gartner’s Hype Cycle for engines, master data Artificial Intelligence, 2018 states, “The management and rising role of content and context for Customer 360 views, delivering insights with AI technologies, as identity and access well as recent knowledge graph offerings management, and for AI applications have pulled knowledge data compliance for graphs to the surface.” regulatory standards and other initiatives. KNOWLEDGE GRAPH MILESTONES The rise of knowledge Google’s launch in 2012 of its own graphs is not going knowledge graph powered in part by its unnoticed by industry acquisition of Freebase, is viewed by many experts. In a recent interview as having helped focus attention on graph with Big Data Quarterly, John technology. The knowledge graph is being O’Brien, CEO and principal pursued behind the scenes to enhance THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES | March 2019 4 search. Described as “the next frontier in search,” the Google knowledge graph collects information about people, places, With the growing range of data sources, and and things, enhances the value of search results by gather information from sources with the increasing speed of data flowing into across the web, including the CIA World organizations, the use of knowledge graphs can Factbook, which provides information on the history, people, government, be expected to play a key role in enterprise data economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational management. In today’s fast-paced business world, issues for 267 world entities; Wikidata, a free and open knowledge base that can the speed of information access can mean the be read and edited by both humans and machines; Wikipedia, the free online difference between timely action and lost opportunity. encyclopedia, and other sources. The goal of Google’s knowledge graph was to not only give users a more complete picture of a topic they were searching, but also to improve the accuracy and speed at which they could find relevant information. Within 7 months of launching, it grew Amazon Web Servicesis also semantic nature of knowledge graphs makes to more than 18 billion facts and is still enabling knowledge graphs using them well-suited for managing and storing growing today as the foundation of systems the metaphactory platform backed data from diverse sources with context and that support AI capabilities in newer robots by Amazon Neptune. A January 2019 relevance. n and smartphones. Amazon blog post by Kunal Sengupta In another key milestone for knowledge points out that “knowledge graphs are graphs, Franz, an innovator in AI and gaining prominence in enterprise data supplier of the semantic graph database management because they offer advantages technology, AllegroGraph, announced for data integration. They also help build in 2018 that it is joining forces with smarter applications that use machine Semantic Web Company, developer of the learning and artificial intelligence (AI) PoolParty Semantic Suite, to pioneer the methods.” It goes on to explain that first knowledge graph for a public figure. Neptune supports open source and The Noam Chomsky Knowledge Graph open-standard API operations semantically links books, interviews, and allows users to take advantage movies, TV programs, and written work of existing information resources from Chomsky, an American linguist, to build their knowledge graphs philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, and host them on a fully political activist, and social critic, who is managed service. sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics.” The content is being made SPEED OF INSIGHT available by searching the knowledge With the growing range of data graph for specific titles, related topics, sources, and with the increasing and concepts, and since the project is speed of data flowing into based on the latest and most advanced organizations, the use of knowledge technologies, the data is also being made graphs can be expected to play a key available as machine-readable information role in enterprise data management. in order to be fed into smart applications, In today’s fast-paced business world, intelligent chatbots, and question/ the speed of information access can answering machines, as well as other AI and mean the difference between timely data systems. action and lost opportunity. The flexible, sponsored content THOUGHT LEADERSHIP SERIES | March 2019 5 AI Knowledge Graph Solutions: Franz Inc. Gartner recently identified Knowledge and predictive analytics from highly “Triple attributes in AllegroGraph add Graphs as a key new technology in both complex, distributed data