NSF OKN Symposium at ISWC 2024

Date: November 12, 2024

Context

The push for AI is bringing focus to foundational data challenges including the need for good data management and data curation practices. Essential to the future of trustworthy AI is the ability to combine the vast amounts of available multi-modal data with trustworthy, curated knowledge networks.

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Harnessing the Data Revolution Big Idea called for the creation of a semantic information infrastructure called the “Open Knowledge Network”. The idea received immediate support from multiple US federal agencies via the OKN Workshop organized by the cross-agency Networking and Information Technology R&D program in October 2018. In 2019, the NSF Convergence Accelerator program funded 22 Phase 1 projects, followed by 5 Phase 2 projects, on this topic. At the heart of OKNs are knowledge graphs, in the sense of the Semantic Web community. The goal of the OKN effort is to provide an essential public data infrastructure for enabling an AI-driven future that both supplements and complements other national efforts in developing machine learning-based approaches for AI.

Based on the significant early interest in the OKN idea and projects the NSF, along with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, organized an OKN Innovation Sprint, with roughly 150 experts from government, industry, academia and nonprofit organizations to help build a roadmap for a Prototype OKN (Proto-OKN) from specific use cases and end-user perspectives [1]. These findings led to an NSF solicitation for proposals which funded a total of 18 Proto-OKN projects beginning in October 2023. Of these, 15 “use-case” projects are covering a wide variety of interconnected application areas and directly involve U.S. federal agencies that are invested in the outcomes; these projects will produce knowledge graphs on biology and health, environmental themes, topics related to justice, and technology and manufacturing. Two “fabric” projects will develop and deploy essential technologies that will form an “interconnected fabric” for the knowledge graphs through links, federated querying, etc. One “education and public engagement” project will provide educational materials and tools for a variety of target audiences.

Event Goals

The NSF OKN efforts are set to be a major accelerator for research and deployment of large-scale knowledge graphs in the U.S. The NSF OKN Symposium at ISWC 2024 shall bring together the U.S. OKN community with knowledge graph researchers and practitioners from around the globe. Concrete goals of the event include:

• Information and technology sharing regarding NSF OKN efforts, technical approaches, and results.
• Establishing relations of NSF Proto-OKN project teams with researchers world-wide that work on similar themes and/or are facing similar technical challenges, for mutual benefit.
• Direct engagement with representatives from U.S. government agencies and industry invested in knowledge graph themes.

The program of the event will include presentations by Proto-OKN projects, a panel with involved U.S. government agency representatives, and time for discussion and networking.

More information and details will be forthcoming.

Schedule