Keynote

Cogan Shimizu

KnowWhereGraph and Sustainability

Abstract: Sustainability takes many facets, but one unifying concept is place. That is, no matter which aspect of sustainability one may choose, place is within context. Indeed, by focusing on place, one may translate from one notion of sustainability to another. For example, byproducts of manufacturing processes impact places, which impact people, which impact processes. It thus behooves us to have a solid understanding of place, and a model of it that can incorporate arbitrarily broad and heterogeneous data and a knowledge. KnowWhereGraph, one of the largest publicly available knowledge graphs – and likely the largest geoKG, can play a central role, acting as a nexus for interoperability by providing a geospatial backbone. Through connections to other large KGs, KnowWhereGraph can play an integral part in understanding sustainability contextually and holistically.

Bio: Cogan Shimizu is an assistant professor at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, USA, where he directs the Knowledge and Semantic Technologies (KASTLE) lab. His research focuses on the use of patterns in knowledge engineering, broadly defined, but especially for the purposes of explainability, interoperability, and improved extensibility of knowledge graphs. He was the principal ontology engineer for KnowWhereGraph – one of the largest publicly available geoKGs in the world – and the Enslaved.org Hub. Currently, he is the developing the Education Gateway to the Proto-OKN, which seeks to unify 18 projects along a technical, social, and knowledge fabric using KGs.