A Pay-as-you-go Methodology to Design and Build Enterprise Knowledge Graphs from Relational Databases

Abstract

Business users must answer business questions quickly to address Business Intelligence (BI) needs. The bottleneck is to understand the complex databases schemas. Only few people in the IT department truly understand them. A holy grail is to empower business users to ask and answer their own questions with minimal IT support. Semantic technologies, now dubbed as Knowledge Graphs, become useful here. Even though the research and industry community has provided evidence that semantic technologies works in the real world, our experience is that there continues to be a major challenge: the engineering of ontologies and mappings covering enterprise databases containing thousands of tables with tens of thousands of attributes. In this paper, we present a novel and unique pay-as-you-go methodology that addresses the aforementioned difficulties. We provide a case study with a large scale e-commerce company where Capsenta’s Ultrawrap has been deployed in production for over 3 years.