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<\/p>\nA long (long, long) time ago, I worked for a company building a semantic web platform. Graphs, and ontologies, and standards governing well-managed data seemed like a promising and achievable future, until the financial crash sucked money and attention out of the space and suddenly they didn\u2019t. Pure and theoretically robust, many of these technologies were \u2014 frankly \u2014\u00a0hell to get working at scale. Fast-forward a couple of decades (or more), and many of those ideas are re-entering mainstream conversations in the asset-intensive industries like manufacturing where I now focus my attention.<\/p>\n
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Image source: an early attempt to think about graphs<\/a>, before the formal standards were really ready, by Eric Miller (no relation), Dan Brickley, and I.<\/p>\n AI Needs Good Data, And Good Data Gets A Helping Hand From A Good Graph<\/p>\n German industrial conglomerate Siemens acquired Altair back in 2024<\/a>, and lurking behind all the simulation froth attached to that acquisition were Cambridge Semantics, and graphs, and ontologies, and all that jazz. Siemens announced<\/a> Intelligence Center X in June, and Siemens Digital Industries\u2019 leaders have been sharing more about it at Siemens Realize Live in Amsterdam this week. Low-code platform Mendix (which Siemens acquired back in 2018) takes top billing in the announcement, but a graph database (from Altair\u2019s RapidMiner\/ Cambridge Semantics stable) now called Graph Studio may ultimately prove more transformative.<\/p>\n At AVEVAWorld in Milan back in May, industrial software company AVEVA\u2019s CEO, Caspar Herzberg, announced the intention to launch \u201ca digital twin builder and an industrial knowledge graph\u201d for their digital industrial platform<\/a>, CONNECT. And then this week AVEVA parent Schneider Electric announced its intention to spend around $3.1 billion acquiring Cognite<\/a>, dashing my plans to write a blog about IFS CEO Mark Moffat popping up on the AVEVA keynote stage in Milan and the Siemens keynote stage in Amsterdam to announce intriguing partnerships between his firm and both of these competitors: that one will have to wait! At the core of Cognite\u2019s increasingly AI-friendly software stack<\/a> sits Cognite Data Fusion and, at it\u2019s heart, a knowledge graph.<\/p>\n AVEVA (and Schneider), Cognite, and Siemens are far from alone in exploring graphs. It\u2019s just intriguing that I\u2019ve sat in rooms having extended conversations with executives from all of them about this precise topic in just the last few weeks. Google had big graph ambitions back around 2010 when the company acquired well-funded startups like MetaWeb. AWS made fresh knowledge graph announcements<\/a> in New York last month, and the graph is gaining prominence in Kognitwin as it and the industrial software company formerly known as Kongsberg Digital Industries morph to become Falkor (company and product).<\/p>\n Before everyone in IT and banking and healthcare and fashion rushes to brief me on their amazing new graph thingummy, I should stress that I don\u2019t formally cover knowledge graphs and related technologies for Forrester. Analyst colleagues including Boris Evelson<\/a>, Indranil Bandyopadhyay<\/a>,\u00a0and Charlie Betz<\/a> do that far better than I could. I was just bemused by this intersection between my past and present lives.<\/p>\n Still, if you\u2019re using (or thinking about using) a knowledge graph in the asset intensive industries Forrester does pay me to think about, I\u2019d love to chat. What are you doing (or trying to do), what works, and what doesn\u2019t? What, if anything, do these manoeuvrings by some of the sector\u2019s big beasts mean for you and your plans? If you have your own perspectives to share, please schedule a briefing<\/a> and tell me all about them. If you\u2019re a Forrester client and want to discuss (or challenge) my thinking on these topics, schedule an inquiry or guidance session<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A long (long, long) time ago, I worked for a company building a semantic web platform. Graphs, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44408,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13020],"tags":[27478,29980,30036,30038,13057,30037,16606],"class_list":["post-44407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-schneider-electric","tag-aveva","tag-cognite","tag-industrial-knowledge-graph","tag-ontology","tag-schneider-electric","tag-semantics","tag-smart-manufacturing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44407\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/france\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}