New publication with contributions from Campus members wins the Best Paper Award - Shards of Knowledge–Modeling Attributions for Event-Centric Knowledge Graphs

Members of the The Leibniz ScienceCampus – Postdigital Participation – Braunschweig visited the International Conference on Conceptual Modelling (ER Conference) in Portugal and won the Best Paper Award.

The conference is about the systematic design of structures and behaviours on an abstract level, which is referred to as conceptual modelling. This method is used in a wide range of areas, from software engineering and business process modelling to the modelling of data and knowledge. The ER Conference has been one of the oldest and most renowned events in this field since 1979.

Knowledge graphs have enjoyed great popularity since around the beginning of the 2010s. The idea behind this is to represent facts in the form of triples and to create ways of logically combining them in order to either retrieve fragments (querying) of knowledge or derive new knowledge from them (reasoning). This is knowledge engineering. Such knowledge graphs are used both in research and in industry to prepare structured domain knowledge. A problem arises when a fact, i.e. a fragment of knowledge, is disputed, i.e. there are at least two opinions as to whether this fragment is true or not. In this paper, a conceptual model has been introduced that formally introduces viewpoints in knowledge graphs, more precisely, in knowledge graphs that deal with real-world events. In this way, contested fragments of knowledge can be enriched with different points of view, and it is possible to derive new knowledge always under the premise of a particular point of view. This is useful, for example, in scenarios in which a hypothesis is adopted in order to carry out what-if analyses. Put simply, the paper introduces the idea that different points of view in such knowledge graphs are a useful addition to event-centred knowledge graphs, as there are often different perspectives on what exactly happened in complex events.

Click here for the publication: Shards of Knowledge–Modeling Attributions for Event-Centric Knowledge Graphs