On the ontology of knowledge graphs

Knowledge Graphs, Metadata Practices, and Badiou's Mathematical Ontology

“…as a representation of the contents of medical and sociological texts" (Nurdiati and Hoede 2008, 1). Apparently, the researchers working in this area did not become aware of complementary work on conceptual graphs in the field of semantic networks until after 1988 (Hoede 1995). The conversion of texts into graphs was a central preoccupation.…”

“…It is interesting to note that the emphasis in this work, as a direct application of mathematical graph theory, is not on entities per se but on the causal links between them: knowledge-how rather than knowledge-of. Hoede (1995) defines an ontology for this system that consists of only one type of entity and fourteen types of links, the core of which are derived from set theoretical relationships. Underpinning this technical ontology is a philosophical framework that joins a set theoretical structure with a subjectivist epistemology:…”

Knowledge Graphs

“…Some works add extra elements to these knowledge graphs, such as edge weights, edge labels, or other meta-data [137]. Other trends include knowledge acquisition from experts [124,318,411] and knowledge extraction from text [26,235,256,484], combinations of symbolic and inductive methods [116,318,444,463], as well as the use of rules [416], ontologies [235], graph analytics [225,269,478], learning [116,411,444,463], and so forth. Later papers (2008-2010) by Kasneci et al [269], Elbassuoni et al [137], Coursey and Mihalcea [102] and Corby and Faron-Zucker [97] introduce notions of knowledge graph similar to current practice.…”

“…In some cases and-or graphs are used to denote conjunctions or disjunctions of such relations [318], while in other cases edges are weighted to assign a belief to a relation [262,318,411]. In addition, papers from 1970-2000 tend to have worked with small graphs, which contrasts with modern practice where knowledge graphs can reach scales of millions or billions of nodes [372]: during this period, computational resources were more limited [448], and fewer sources of structured data were readily available meaning that the knowledge graphs were often sourced solely from human experts [124,318,411] or from text [26,235,256,484].…”

“…Bakker (1987) [26] defines a knowledge graph with the purpose of accumulatively representing content gleaned from medical and sociological texts, with a focus on causal relationships. Work on knowledge graphs from the same group would continue over the years, with contributions by Stokman and de Vries (1988) [484] further introducing mereological (part of ) and instantiation (is a) relations to the knowledge graph, and thereafter by James [256], Hoede [235], Popping [402], Zhang [550], amongst others, in the decades that followed [374]. The notion of knowledge graph used in such works considered a fixed number of relations.…”