In the “hype cycle” methodology created by the Gartner research company, an “innovation trigger” sends a new technology climbing up “the peak of inflated expectations.”

On Gartner’s most recent (2020) Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence, “knowledge graphs” have just reached the summit. Ahead will lie disillusionment for some, but for others, enlightenment and productivity await.

As Gartner has noted, knowledge graphs are increasingly popular tools to make sense of our digital world. They display information in ways that help researchers identify important relationships – relationships all too often submerged in an overwhelming sea of data.

In enterprise settings, knowledge graphs – as well as other visualization techniques – display customer, partner and third-party data to yield insights in context that can drive business innovation.

The Knowledge Graph Conference showcases leading innovations and topics in the field, focused on elevating social good applications of knowledge graphs and related technologies.

Among other important innovations, KGC co-founder Thomas Deely explains, knowledge graphs are at the heart of your smart speaker.

“We’re now asking questions in the same way as we’d ask questions of humans. And our expectations of the answers we’re getting back are becoming higher and higher. And we’re asking more sophisticated questions and hoping for more sophisticated answers,” Deely tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“There are many technologies involved – there’s Natural Language Processing, there’s Machine Learning, there’s Artificial Intelligence – but more and more, the plumbing behind how those models access the data is driven by a special database called a graph database.”

On Wednesday, March 31, at 11 a.m. Eastern time, CCC presents a special Town Hall program – “Solve for Success: The Transformative Power of Data Visualization.” Register at https://web.cvent.com/event/a2b692ba-063f-4b23-81ef-e1aa856bacf5/summary.