Abstract: Google's Knowledge Graph is a durable collection of entities. As new things are learned over time about an entity, those "facts" are added to the entity. This long term accumulation of knowledge is central to the value of KG. To make this growth strategy work, the entities must be easily distinguishable from one another and stable in what they represent. But how should the boundaries between each entity be determined? Moreover, what is the right granularity of categories and relations that should be applied to these entities? There are many options for how the world could be cleaved ontologically, but experience with a large stable knowledge graph has shown that pragmatically some criteria may matter more than others. And yet, in some cases, the decision might not be as important as we thought.

Bio: Jamie manages the Schema Team for Google’s Knowledge Graph. The team’s responsibilities include extending KG’s underlying semantic representation, growing coverage of the ontology and enforcing semantic policy. He joined Google following the acquisition of Metaweb Technologies where he was the Minister of Information, helping organize data in Freebase and evangelizing semantic representation to web developers. Prior to Metaweb, Jamie worked in enterprise software as CTO of Determine Software and before that started one of the first ISPs in San Francisco. He is co-author of the O’Reilly book, “Programming the Semantic Web.” Jamie has a PhD from Harvard University and earned his bachelor’s degree from Colorado College.