The Rise of the Knowledge Graph

Executive Summary

While data has always been important to business across industries, in recent years the essential role of data in all aspects of business has become increasingly clear. The availability of data in everyday life—from the ability to find any information on the web in the blink of an eye to the voice-driven support of automated personal assistants—has raised the expectations of what data can deliver for businesses. It is not uncommon for a company leader to say, “Why can’t I have my data at my fingertips, the way Google does it for the web?”

This is where a structure called a knowledge graph comes into play.

A knowledge graph is a combination of two things: business data in a graph, and an explicit representation of knowledge. Businesses manage data so that they can understand the connections between their customers, products or services, features, markets, and anything else that impacts the enterprise. A graph represents these connections directly, allowing us to analyze and understand the relationships that drive business forward. Knowledge provides background information such as what kinds of things are important to the company and how they relate to one another. An explicit representation of business knowledge allows different data sets to share a common reference. A knowledge graph combines the business data and the business knowledge to provide a more complete and integrated experience with the organization’s data.

What does ...