Despite having been around since the 1980s, Knowledge Graphs have become something of a buzzword of late. With an influx of Knowledge Graph conferences in recent years and businesses like eBay and Air BnB publicising their use, it’s no surprise that everyone is talking about them and their ability to transform corporate practices. But, what are the key benefits of Knowledge Graphs? And how can they be used? We take a look at our top eight advantages to adopting Knowledge Graph technology in 2021 and examine why they’re worth their weight in data.
One of the most valuable and fundamental uses of Knowledge Graphs is to express relationships between data. Knowledge Graphs visualise the nature of an underlying relationship and how they are interconnected to gain sufficient enough understanding of the landscape to inform more intelligent strategic business decisions.
At a high level, Knowledge Graphs provide the following main benefits:
Knowledge Graphs help to combine disparate silos of data, giving you an overview of all of your knowledge – not only departmentally but also across departments and global organisations.
Accumulating data doesn’t mean just assembling documents and excel sheets. Knowledge Graph technology means being able to connect different types of data in meaningful ways and supporting richer data services than most knowledge management systems. This information can then be used to extract and discover deeper and more subtle patterns.
Using a Knowledge Graph means no more looking through piles of paper to find a particular document as Knowledge Graphs provide relevant facts and contextualised answers to your specific questions, rather than a broad search result with lots of irrelevant information.
Knowledge Graphs provide a model of how everything is related, having each subject or object represented only once with all its relationships, in the context of all of the other subjects and their relationships. This makes it possible to see how everything is related at a big picture level.
Knowledge Graphs summarise relationships so effectively and so efficiently, they can easily scale to accommodate more and more information. Knowledge Graphs are truly unparalleled in their capability to express interconnected relationships.
Knowledge Graphs are also a great choice for gaining insights from hierarchical data. Hierarchically viewing data is particularly useful for represent-ing sequences of decisions that lead to conclusions. Knowledge Graphs are also great at prioritising information gathering and provides an ideal, intuitive framework for portraying characteristics of and their relationships.
Knowledge Graphs are great for revealing communities, which are fundamental to understanding macro relationships and dynamics in business data. Communities in a Knowledge Graph visualisation are qualitatively reflected by clusters of related members in close proximity, distinguishable from the field of another graph member. Linking communities provides useful information about patterns of interests and influence.
Knowledge Graphs are also a great way to visualise a flow of information – showing information flows of a business process or any transactional activities that may reveal hidden risks or show patterns over time.
Knowledge Graphs can be used to show network data, how network routers and hubs are connected and their characteristics.
