Knowledge Graphs — The Ontology, Populated
An ontology is the blueprint; a knowledge graph is the building. A knowledge graph is a network of real-world entities and the relationships between them, structured against an ontology so that both humans and machines can navigate it, query it, and reason over it. They power web search, recommendations, fraud detection, and increasingly the grounding of LLMs — and understanding what makes a graph a "knowledge" graph is understanding why this shape of data keeps winning for connected problems.
A knowledge graph is the ontology populated — entities as nodes, typed relationships as edges, integrated from many sources. RDF vs property graphs, and why graphs win for connected problems: relationships are first-class (traversal, not join cascades), the schema flexes, and meaning lives in structure.