A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Why PLM need to learn about Google Knowledge Graph?

Why PLM need to learn about Google Knowledge Graph?
Oleg
Oleg
20 May, 2012 | 2 min for reading

Last week was clearly Facebook week. However, if you had a chance to take your head out of Facebook IPO and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan wedding, you probably noticed an interesting news that came out of Google. It called Google Knowledge Graph.

If you never heard about it, start with Google’s blog post – Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings. The following Google video can give you an initial idea of what is that.

What is behind Google Knowledge Graph?

Google Knowledge Graph (GKG) is a database of information about what Google calls “things”. The ideas are going to multiple places – semantic web, internet of things, semantic search, linked data, etc. In my view, Google acquisition of Freebase two years ago, became an important event towards building of knowledge graph. Here is an interesting passage from Google blog:

Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.

It is not so clear how GKG was built and organized. Google clearly mixed information collected from Freebase, CIA Factbook and Wikipedia. You can read Deconstructing Google Knowledge Graph blog post for more information about “How?” it is done. It is still on the level of guesses. I’m sure in the next few months we will see more examples and explanations.

Why PLM vendors should care?

PLM vendors and product are struggling with the high level of complexity. It comes also from the side of semantic richness of data as well as from the side of user interaction complexity. Google Knowledge graph shows an interesting way to simplify knowledge representation and knowledge interaction with end users. Another aspect is related to the large-scale information modeling. The information about products and product lifecycle is getting more and more complicated every day. PLM products running on SQL databases will have to find a better technological foundation for the future scale.

What is my conclusion? Web technologies are moving forward with the speed of light. I cannot say the same about enterprise software. For the majority of people in manufacturing companies, life is a bunch of Excel spreadsheets and databases with applications running for years. The cost of existing IT environments is skyrocketing. The trends like BYOD shows that people cannot tolerate outdated IT anymore. So, how to build a product knowledge graph in your company? This is a question PLM managers need to ask these days. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Picture credit to Mashable GKG can change search forever article

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
13 August, 2009

Do you think PLM is about a process, right? Reading last buzz about social networking and product development I actually...

8 October, 2023

Early this week, I attended TechSoft 3D Boston Summit. If you’re not familiar with TechSoft 3D, check them out. It...

16 July, 2014

PaaS is a category of cloud computing service providing platform and solution stack. This service model is including not only...

7 September, 2017

PLM business has a clear potential to grow. The last two weeks demonstrated that some investors have strong believe in...

31 January, 2025

Peter Druker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast and then stays hungry all day”. In many manufacturing companies, people store...

6 January, 2012

It was a long time I didn’t talk about process management. The importance of process management is obvious. One of...

21 December, 2018

I attended The State of PLM economy webinar organized by CIMdata – leading source of information and analytics about PLM...

4 September, 2018

For the last few years, PLM community and vendors got used to the word “cloud”. You can see that every...

5 December, 2020

You can’t sit in two chairs with one butt. Well, Siemens’s SaaS strategy says you actually can. TeamcenterX SaaS strategy...

Blogroll

To the top