What is the most interesting use of a graph database you ever seen? PWC responds.

The most interesting use is the most powerful: standard RDF graphs for large-scale knowledge graph integration.

From my notes on a talk Parsa Mirhaji of Montefiore Health System gave in 2017. Montefiore uses Franz AllegroGraph, a distributed RDF graph database. He modeled a core patient-centric hospital knowledge need using a simple standard ontology with a 1,000 or so concepts total.

That model integrated data from lots of different kinds of heterogeneous sources so that doctors could query the knowledge graph from tablets or phones at a patient’s bedside and get contextualized, patient-specific answers to questions for diagnostic purposes.

Fast forward to 2018, and nine out of ten of the most value-creating companies in the world are using standard knowledge graphs in a comparable fashion, either as a base for multi-domain intelligent assistants a la Siri or Alibot or Alexa, or to integrate and contextualize business domains cross-enterprise, or both. The method is preparatory to what John Launchbury of DARPA described as the Third Wave of AI………….