Understanding Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs

An introduction to Knowledge Graphs and Ontologies with Elisa Kendall followed by and update on OMG Ontology standards with Evan Wallace. Presented live Sept. 15 as part of the OMG Q3 Technical Committee meeting. Google popularized the notion of a knowledge graph, loosely defined as a network of entities and their interrelationships in 2012. Although the phrase has been popularized relatively recently, the underlying technologies have been around for decades. The OMG Ontology PSIG was founded in the early 2000s, more than 15 years ago, largely by people who also participated in the W3C’s Semantic Web community. Recent articles by Gartner, ZDNet and others point out the growing importance of knowledge graphs, including the need to bridge the gaps between property graphs and semantically enabled graphs, emphasizing the importance of metadata and explainability. OMG has been developing standards for many years to support ontologies and linked data. Evan will briefly describe some relevant semantic modeling, API, and domain content specifications developed or in development at OMG, and the status and plans for such work in the future.