Ask HN: Any open access alternatives to Google's knowledge graph? - emrgx
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mindcrime
A completely equivalent alternative, that's ready to use "out of the box"?
Probably not. But a lot of the pieces you need to build something like
Google's knowledge graph are out there.

For starters, you have things like Wikidata[1] and dbPedia[2] which give you
access to Wikipedia data in a structured form. Then you have datasets like
OpenCyc[3] and Freebase[4] that you could include.

Then, there are tools like Stanbol[5] which can, to a certain extent, extract
structured data from free text. Of course this isn't perfect, since you'd
basically need to have solved AGI to do this completely. But you can get
_some_ "knowledge" from free text. Combine that with a crawling system like
ManifoldCF[6] or Nutch[7] or something, and you could imagine building a
pipeline to crawl websites and add to your knowledge-base.

If you decide to use RDF as the representation for the knowledgebase, there
are things like Jena[8] that let you store and query your KB and do inference
against it. Do all that, and probably add in a little more AI / NLP and you
can build your own knowledge graph.

OK, yes, the "add a little more AI" bit is kinda hand-wavy, but that's an area
of open research. Still, there are practical things that can be done today...
and if you're looking for a thesis topic, well, here ya go. :-)

[1]:
[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page)

[2]: [http://wiki.dbpedia.org/](http://wiki.dbpedia.org/)

[3]: [http://sw.opencyc.org/](http://sw.opencyc.org/)

[4]:
[https://developers.google.com/freebase/](https://developers.google.com/freebase/)

[5]: [http://stanbol.apache.org](http://stanbol.apache.org)

[6]: [http://manifoldcf.apache.org](http://manifoldcf.apache.org)

[7]: [http://nutch.apache.org](http://nutch.apache.org)

[8]: [http://jena.apache.org](http://jena.apache.org)

~~~
emrgx
It seems like a lot of people are moving into the space to be the provider for
creating structured data. I haven't seen any applications that are building a
knowledge graph like Google for other to build applications on top of. Google
turned theirs into a "knowledge vault" in order to build their own
applications on top of it. It seems like it would be a good space to do what
Google is doing but open it up for other to build apps.

Thanks for the response. Very informative.

~~~
mindcrime
FWIW, the reason I'm familiar with the "stack" mentioned above is exactly
because we're working on something like that. Our focus is more in internal
knowledge than the general web, but there's no reason that overall methodology
couldn't be applied more widely (although making it all scale is a technical
challenge to be sure!). I could see us offering a "knowledge graph API"
service of some sort down the road, depending on how other initiatives shake
out.

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marfi
@mindcrime has put a pretty extensive list and explanation.

The things is, you are probably looking for a solution that does the
reconciliation of data arriving from multiple sources and formats for you and
preferably exposes it over an easy to use API.

You can try [http://unigraph.io](http://unigraph.io), the API Sandbox
(GraphQL) is available at:
[http://u01.unigraph.rocks](http://u01.unigraph.rocks) and an extensive
documentation covers it at:
[https://github.com/unigraph/docs/wiki](https://github.com/unigraph/docs/wiki)

Currently Unigraph combines data from:

\- wikidata

\- geonames

\- freebase

\- crunchbase

\- SEC EDGAR

\- Companies House (UK).

A datadump is on its way and more sources will be added soon.

Disclaimer: I am building Unigraph, precisely for the reason of the question:
"An open alternative to GKG".

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tinodotim
There would be, of course, one (if not the no. 1) google knowledge graph
source: Wikidata.

[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page)

