Knowledge Graph Technologies: the Next Frontier of the Food, Agriculture, and Water Domains

A Knowledge Graph (KG) is based on a graph model to encode the description of entities. As defined by Hogan and his collaborators in 2022, a knowledge graph is “a graph of data intended to accumulate and convey knowledge of the real world, whose nodes represent entities of interest and whose edges represent relations between these entities.” For Knowledge Graph using Semantic Web technologies, entities (people, events, concepts, etc.) are identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI). This URI is the source of a graph description, the edge specifies the nature of the link (person name or brotherhood relationship) and the destination of the edge could be a simple literal (the person name) or a URI that identifies another entity (the URI of the brother). The main advantage of these technologies is to link entities that are described differently in several knowledge graphs provided by various organizations. Thus, computer scientists may analyze all those graph descriptions to derive new information (detect incoherencies, complete data, etc.). During the last decade, considerable progress has been made in the construction and enrichment of KGs, including ontology matching, data integration, fact prediction, and validation. This happened largely thanks to the use of techniques developed in the fields of knowledge representation, reasoning, and machine learning. With these advances, more and more applications are now able to produce and process KGs in domains such as life sciences, Galleries/Libraries/Archives/Museums (GLAMs), and health care. The subjects of interest within the Food, Agriculture, and Water domains are often complex phenomena where entities evolve through time and space. Those phenomena may be transformed by different processes and influenced by both human and natural systems. The scientific disciplines that study these phenomena are diverse and do not necessarily share the same vocabularies, the same techniques of observation, the same analyses, and so on. Indeed, each discipline often has its own point of view to describe the complexity of the studied phenomena. KG technologies provide one possible approach to express this diversity of representations and align or combine them. This Research Topic has received 13 abstracts, from which 8 articles were accepted. Three articles present a method, 4 articles are original research, and 1 is a conceptual analysis. Overall they cover three broad Research Topics often discussed in the KG research communities: ontologies design, data architectures, reasoning.