In simple terms, a Knowledge Graph or KG for short, helps to show relationships between information or data by showing how those pieces of information are connected. Often, data or information inside an organisation is stored in many different places and is often stored in different ways, systems, it's shaped and sized differently too. This can make it difficult to make sense of, especially when we consider the amount of information that tends to be stored!
Visually, a KG allows a user to traverse a kind of map of the information to explore relationships between the data. The original concept of the internet envisioned a spiders web (The Web) - Imagine all the little joins between a spiders web as pieces of information, and the threads between them as ways to get to the information. That’s what a KG is. Its different to the traditional Database world of systems such as RDBMS’s like Oracle, where if you want to find some information out, you need to sort of know where it is first. Same thing with when you want to add to it - RDBMS has quite a rigid structure (think Rows and Columns, like Excel), so there’s a strict way in which you can add data in; with a KG you simply weave another thread on the web.
Over the last 10-20 years data has been growing exponentially, storage costs have reduced, and this creates a problem in that data now has many complex layers to it, and retrieving information, that you can trust, has become a full time job for many people in large organisations. A KG simplifies this significantly, and allows organisations to do all sorts of things much much faster and more efficiently than before.
