Building a Knowledge Graph — Construction and Entity Resolution
The hardest part of a knowledge graph isn't querying it or designing the ontology — it's building it from messy, real-world data. Most of your knowledge lives in databases that don't connect, documents that don't parse, and records that refer to the same thing by different names. Construction is the engineering of turning that mess into a clean, connected graph, and its central, unglamorous challenge is entity resolution: deciding when two records are actually the same thing. This post is about the work that makes or breaks a knowledge graph.
The hard part isn't the ontology or the queries — it's construction. The pipeline from heterogeneous sources, and its make-or-break challenge: entity resolution (deciding when two records are the same thing). Under-merging fragments; over-merging asserts false connections; connectivity amplifies every error.