A little semantics may go a long way, and much of the progress to and impact of Knowledge Graphs are based on this. Metadata and data governance can directly benefit, which is important for regulatory compliance and beyond.
Electronic Arts, one of the leaders in the gaming industry, is using Knowledge Graphs to transform how the company operates. Getting data governance right has boosted EA’s content
marketing reach, by enabling it to reach more channels and be more discoverable, translating to more sales.
Data Governance: How prepared are enterprises for the impending GDPR?
Aaron Bradley, Knowledge Graph Strategist at EA, shared how schema.org has been a foundation for this outcome:
“As soon as schema.org came into being, the use of microdata sky-rocketed, and as soon as JSON-LD came on in the scene, tracking back to just 2015…it wouldn’t surprise me if JSON-LD
surpassed microdata sometime soon.
“The great thing about JSON-LD isn’t the LD part, it’s the JSON part. Its the format that developers were intimately comfortable working with on a day-to-day basis, and to use a drug
analogy: whether or not they knew they were using linked data, they were injecting linked data into the system.
“JSON-LD has proved to be an enormous success in terms of supporting syntax for the vocabulary.
“An example is if you’re redesigning an e-commerce site and you have to move all the elements around, if you’re trying to re-jig that with micro-data or RFA and you have to make sure the span and pegs are closed correctly—it can be a nightmare. JSON-LD came a long way in correcting that.”
As well as fine-tuning data governance, linked data and semantics is enabling pharmaceutical and medical companies to understand the data flow of activities and to identify and document the legal justification for each type of activity.
Major providers of scientific technical and medical information, Elsevier, also uses data lineage to define policies for GDPR compliance.
Paraskevi Zerva, Cognition and Presentation Lead at Elsevier, commented on how linked data powers this approach during his session at CDL2018:
“Data governance is a set of processes that ensures that data assets are efficiently managed and enables gaining control of and having a better understanding of your data.
“It ensures that data can be trusted and organisations can show accountability about their assets with regards to data quality, retention, data lineage etc.
“Data lineage refers to capturing the sequence of data flows involving a data element—it can be represented visually to discover the movement of data artefact from its source to its destination to understand where this originates from.”
Businesses need to think differently about data management in the digital age
Leading technology company IBM is investing in metadata that optimises its tools from many vendors. This open metadata management is coupled with open governance API’s to enable business owners to set policies with a target to revolutionise the data industry.
“If you think about the way we’re trained in software engineering, we hide data behind services, and it’s supposed to be private services. There’s a whole assumption of how that data should be used and we come along with our big data systems and our AI ideas to using analytics, and we rip that data out of those systems and expect it to be understandable,” said Mandy Chessel,
Distinguished Engineer at IBM.
“In order for this to work, it has to be something that everybody can be a part of, and available for free, and not requiring somebody with a PhD in computer science.”
The perception about governance and metadata is not something that can provide quick wins and impressive outcomes on its own. Without them, however, there is no solid foundation to build data sustainability and good organisational practices. Regulations such as the GDPR is an opportunity for organisations to get their data governance right, and Linked Data can be a solid foundation for data governance.
