Re: Trip Reports on Dagstuhl Seminar on Knowledge Graphs

FWIW, my view on it is that KG is a collective term that serves more as an umbrella for different approaches to collect, structure and process knowledge, incl. KR, but not restricted to.
This is also my take-home from the discussions in Dagtuhl and why we - deliberately - refrained from giving any more restricting definition.

> There's the 
> Semantic Web, there's Linked Data, now there's the Knowledge Graph. Each
> with a slightly different focus perhaps as you point out in your presentation,
> but with little substantive change.

I would simply call this evolution, which FWIW is most of the time gradual.

> There *are* fundamental problems with RDF. The main one is that it is
> impossible to coherently make statements about statements.
> [...]
> but those areas remain out of reach 
> for SW/LD/KG so long as the underlying RDF doesn't change to allow
> it.

I beg to disagree: there are several proposals on reification for RDF, there is RDF*, so things are moving on in exactly this direction.
There are approaches working in practice, such that the one taken in Wikidata which have been 
shown to be workable within an RDF/SPARQL context, cf. Wikidata's query service.

I.e., there is evolution and development, and that's a good thing, but this is an ongoing process and there is no sense in throwing away 
all that has been done on RDF and SW and start from scratch... that was also the base message I wanted to convey in my talk slides, BTW.

>  And so, we are stuck. We can fix it, or we can keep inventing new
> names.

IMHO, it's not about inventing names, it's about recognizing gaps and closing them, abotu not throwing out the baby with the bathtub and re-inventing the wheel, about combining 
and evolving successful approaches... whether terminology/naming evolves over time as well is secondary.

aqnyway, I kinda hope/suppose we're (readers of this list, at least) on the same page here anyway

best regards,
Axel 
--
Prof. Dr. Axel Polleres
Institute for Information Business, WU Vienna
url: http://www.polleres.net/  twitter: @AxelPolleres

> On 28.08.2019, at 12:36, William Waites <wwaites@tardis.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
>> Well, link works for me, but in fact that was the pre-print version
>> of the report, the official link on the Dagstuhl page:
> 
> Thanks for the link, Axel. I have no idea why it didn't work for me
> earlier, but it does now. I've read (quickly skimmed, really) the 
> canonical version of the report. My tuppence worth follows.
> 
> I'm a little puzzled about the Knowledge Graph. Is it a marketing term?
> The question is only a little facetious: quite a few of the reports are
> struggling to define what it is. We know that graphs are general structures
> for representing a variety of different things, that's a very old idea and
> it's very powerful (think objects and arrows). We know that going from
> discrete entities (e.g. labellings) to continuous ones is hard and unobvious
> so we get divisions in fields between graphs and rules on the one hand and
> statistics and neural networks on the other. Plenty of potentially productive
> open problems and questions lie that way.
> 
> I think what Paola might be getting at is the way that we have continually
> invented new words for whatever it is we are doing here. There's the 
> Semantic Web, there's Linked Data, now there's the Knowledge Graph. Each
> with a slightly different focus perhaps as you point out in your presentation,
> but with little substantive change. That's what I mean by marketing terms
> (easily recognised by the proper noun casing).
> 
> There *are* fundamental problems with RDF. The main one is that it is
> impossible to coherently make statements about statements. Without that,
> we can't build hierarchies of statements and things like time and provenance
> and the like (mentioned in the report) can't be done. These are important
> and fascinating areas to research, but those areas remain out of reach 
> for SW/LD/KG so long as the underlying RDF doesn't change to allow
> it. And so, we are stuck. We can fix it, or we can keep inventing new
> names.
> 
> Best wishes,
> 
> William Waites | wwaites@inf.ed.ac.uk
> Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation
> School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
> 
> -- 
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 28 August 2019 11:34:25 UTC