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20122010s
Knowledge Graphs
Facts stored as a network of entities and relations rather than as strings of text.
Why It Was Important
Google's 2012 announcement — 'things, not strings' — put the idea in front of the public: represent the world as entities joined by typed relations, so a system can answer about a person rather than match characters in a page. Knowledge graphs became the structured backbone behind search panels, voice assistants and enterprise data, and the approach has outlived the era that produced it: retrieval-augmented generation and tool-using agents both lean on exactly this kind of structured grounding.
Who Invented It
Building on decades of semantic-network and Semantic Web research, and on the Freebase dataset Google acquired in 2010.
Applications
- Search
- Question Answering
- Recommendation
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation