Chapter 09 · Sustainability & AISustainability & AI

Knowledge graph

Meaning statusEstablishedSource recordDirect document linkedWhy these are different

Definition

A structured representation of entities and the relationships between them, stored as a connected network that machines can query and reason over.

References

ACM Computing Surveys / arXivHogan et al. — Knowledge Graphs (2021)

This source provides part of the technical or institutional basis for the definition.

NeurIPS 2020 / arXivLewis et al. — Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks

This source supports the explanation of how the term is applied, measured or governed in practice.

Overview

What it means

Knowledge graphs organise facts as subject–relation–object triples, integrating heterogeneous data into a navigable structure; Hogan et al.' s 2021 survey is the standard technical reference. They complement, rather than replace, statistical AI — increasingly as grounding sources for language models.

How it is used

Uses include supply-chain mapping, regulatory knowledge bases, ESG data integration and scientific discovery platforms — anywhere fragmented sustainability data must be joined into a coherent whole.

Why it matters

Most sustainability data problems are joining problems: emissions factors here, facilities there, suppliers somewhere else. Knowledge graphs provide the connective tissue that makes such data traversable, queryable and auditable.