Third Workshop on an Open Knowledge Network: Building the National Semantic Information Infrastructure

University Of California-San Francisco, San Francisco CA

Investigators

Abstract

This workshop engages a multidisciplinary community in a discussion about taking the initial steps in building an evolving Open Knowledge Network to encode all entities and the relationships among them, that would evolve continuously with new data and information. The OKN would thus be a fundamental building block in evolving the world-wide web to a new level of semantic understanding and application. The vision of such a knowledge graph is feasible given the availability of big data that are growing with time; advanced machine learning techniques that can aid in the creation of such a massive graph, and in its use; and, importantly, demonstration of the power of such knowledge graphs via extant commercial services such as Apple Siri; GoogleTalk; Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft Cortana. An Open Knowledge Network would enable a new generation of knowledge-rich intelligent applications and systems. The workshop examines the applicability of this idea across multiple disciplines and applications domains. Experts from a wide range of disciplines, including biomedicine, medicine, geosciences, finance, and manufacturing, will discuss domain-specific issues as well as identify common approaches and common issues that cut across domains. The workshop will develop concrete steps to be taken to help realize the vision of OKN. Natural interfaces to large knowledge structures have the potential to impact science, education and business to an extent comparable to the WWW. While the first wave of such technology is now available in consumer services such as Siri, GoogleTalk, Cortana and Alexa, these services are limited in their scope of knowledge; not open to direct access or to contributors beyond their corporate firewalls; and, able to answer only relatively limited questions in specific business domains. An open initiative of the type being proposed would allow for experimentation at scale across many user communities and would support research and innovation in academia, enable industry to experiment, and enable governments at various levels (local, state, federal) to create new services using Open Data. The vision for the proposed OKN is that it would aspire to be a listing of every known concept from the worlds of science, business, medicine and human affairs. It would include not just raw data, but semantic information in machine readable form. The architecture would allow contributors to encode the knowledge related to their topics of interest and, thus, connect that to the larger network, without having to go through so-called "gatekeepers". By providing an open service, OKN would enable the notion of "permission-less innovation." Indeed, an open resource like OKN may be in a better position to provide more trustworthy information/knowledge than proprietary, closed systems. The vision for creating such a common knowledge network resonates with the NSF Big Ideas of Harnessing the Data Revolution and Convergence.