Knowledge Graphs and their Role in the Knowledge Engineering of the 21st Century

Motivation

As knowledge graphs are now extensively used in everything from search engines and chatbots to product recommenders and autonomous systems, we think it is time to reflect upon the state of the art of the field, revisit its foundations, and look into the future.

Like many other methodology-driven disciplines, knowledge engineering evolved from waterfall-like approaches to agile, participatory ones. Understanding how these work for knowledge graphs in a world of smart devices, alternative user interfaces, data silos, and misinformation is critical.

This Dagstuhl Seminar will help us gain a better understanding of the way knowledge graphs are created, maintained, and used today, and identify research challenges in modelling, representation, reasoning, and evolution. These will form the basis for new methodologies, methods and tools, applicable to various types of AI systems using knowledge graphs, for instance, natural language processing or information retrieval. To facilitate this, we will bring together knowledge scientists and engineers from different areas to take an inventory of solutions, discuss open problems, and identify opportunities for novel research and technology transfer. We intend the seminar to be the kick-off of a virtual network that includes seminar participants as well as other researchers to jointly work on the challenges and convene regularly to present results and exchange ideas and identify opportunities for funding and support for cross-border collaborations.

Specific challenges include understanding knowledge graphs and automation, user experiences of creating and using knowledge graphs for a diverse set of contributors, and supporting and evaluating hybrid knowledge graph engineering workflows.

Expected results / outcome of the Dagstuhl Seminar

• A report summarizing the discussions held during the seminar, which we will aim to turn into a call for papers for an edited volume inviting the community to further the state of the art.
• A visual summary of the plenary discussions, created by a professional illustrator, shared with the wider community. This will cover the plenary sessions.
• Terms of reference for the virtual network, initial composition, and plans to launch in Q3 2022.
• Funding roadmap and emerging bids ideas.