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Knowledge Graphs: State-of-the-Art and Applications

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A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Computing and Artificial Intelligence".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (20 February 2025) | Viewed by 12522

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Fugazza Cristiano

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Guest Editor

Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment, National Research Council of Italy (CNR-IREA), Via Bassini 15, I-20133 Milan, Italy
Interests: semantic web; open data; FAIR technologies; ontologies; spatial data infrastructures; health informatics

Dr. Gloria Bordogna

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Guest Editor

CNR IREA, Via Bassini 15, 20133 Milan, Italy
Interests: fuzzy logic and soft computing for the representation and management of imprecision and uncertainty of textual and geographic information; volunteered geographic information user-driven quality assessment in citizen science; crowdsourced information spatiotemporal analytics; information retrieval on the web; flexible query languages for information retrieval and geographic information systems; ill-defined environmental knowledge representation and management; multisource geographic information fusion and synthesis
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Dear Colleagues,

It has taken more than 50 years since the inception of the relational model for a novel paradigm to gain momentum, due to the increasingly interconnected and networked nature of modern data, the need for incremental modeling of data structures, the ease of integration with the richer semantics of ontologies and the promise of explainable artificial intelligence. Knowledge graphs provide the theoretical underpinning for such data representation strategies and the link to more expressive knowledge representation formalisms. The Special Issue aims to portray the status of and outlook for this technology via both seminal contributions on its underlying techniques and a selected range of case studies.

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

Automatic KG definition obtained from collections of unstructured heterogeneous documents and data,
Flexible KG querying,
KG interactive visualization,
KG hierarchical summarization,
KGs and ontology integration,
KGs and geospatial data management,
KGs as a means to support XAI.

Dr. Fugazza Cristiano
Dr. Gloria Bordogna
Guest Editors

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Keywords

automatic KG definition obtained from collections of unstructured heterogeneous documents and data
flexible KG querying
KG interactive visualization
KG hierarchical summarization
KGs and ontology integration
KGs and geospatial data management
KGs as a means to support XAI

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Published Papers (7 papers)

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Research

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25 pages, 43321 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Enabling Biodiversity-Informed Architecture Through Ontology-Driven Data Integration

by Albin Ahmeti, Defne Sunguroglu Hensel, Cédric Pruski, Jakub Tyc and Michael Hensel

Appl. Sci. 2025, 15(10), 5311; https://doi.org/10.3390/app15105311 - 9 May 2025

Viewed by 227

Abstract

Urban biodiversity is essential for sustainable cities, as it helps address the challenges of environmental degradation, ecosystem loss, species decline, and increased vulnerability to climate hazards, which negatively affect human health and well-being. ECOLOPES (ECOlogical building enveloPES) aims to develop a design approach for multi-species as stakeholders to achieve regenerative urban ecosystems. Integrating the diverse data required for stakeholders and beyond—spanning the life sciences, geography, and architecture—and utilising it for design presents a significant challenge. This paper introduces an ontology-driven approach that utilises ontology-based data management (OBDM) as a framework for integrating diverse data sources, enabling ecologists and architects to design sites and buildings that foster urban biodiversity. OBDM offers a unified view of multiple data sources through an ontology, enabling query and update operations to be performed directly on the integrated data. The proposed ontology, developed in collaboration with domain experts and adhering to Semantic Web and Linked Data best practices, serves as a mediator between life sciences data (e.g., species distribution and habitats) and geometric information (e.g., maps and voxel models of building structures). This integration enables the adaptation of sites, buildings, and geometries, respectively, to create habitats that attract and support urban wildlife, contributing to ecological sustainability. The paper illustrates the practical utility of the ontology through a case study, highlighting its role in guiding building designs that promote species attractiveness and urban biodiversity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Knowledge Graphs: State-of-the-Art and Applications)

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28 pages, 10564 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Aging-Friendly Design Research: Knowledge Graph Construction for Elderly Advantage Applications

by Xiaoying Li, Xingda Wang and Guangran Li

Appl. Sci. 2025, 15(5), 2848; https://doi.org/10.3390/app15052848 - 6 Mar 2025

Viewed by 704

Abstract

In the field of aging design, obtaining elderly advantage data is a challenge. In this study, we developed a visualization tool using knowledge graph technology to assist designers in studying elderly advantages, promoting their application in design practice. First, brainstorming sessions and workshops were held to analyze the challenges of applying elderly advantages in design. Based on these challenges, the concept and functional design of an elderly advantages knowledge graph were proposed. Next, the elderly advantages knowledge graph was constructed by following these steps: (1) The KJ-AHP method was used to process raw data, making them structured and quantitative. (2) The ontology of the knowledge graph was reverse-engineered based on the functional requirements of the graph, allowing the construction of the knowledge graph model layer. (3) The processed data were applied to the knowledge graph ontology through AHP-ontology mapping rules, allowing the knowledge content construction. (4) The programming language Cypher was used for the functional verification of the elderly advantages knowledge graph, and a satisfaction survey was conducted through questionnaires to assess the verification process. The elderly advantages knowledge graph constructed in this study initially fulfilled the expected functions and was met with high satisfaction. The application of knowledge graph technology provides a new reference for advantage mining in the design field. Based on the innovative combination of KJ-AHP and knowledge graph technology, this study enhances the structuring and quantification of graph data, significantly facilitating designers’ understanding of data structures, clarifying data relationships, and expanding design thinking. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Knowledge Graphs: State-of-the-Art and Applications)

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21 pages, 710 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Efficient and Effective Unsupervised Entity Alignment in Large Knowledge Graphs

by Weishan Cai, Ruqi Zhou and Wenjun Ma

Appl. Sci. 2025, 15(4), 1976; https://doi.org/10.3390/app15041976 - 13 Feb 2025

Viewed by 968

Abstract

Entity Alignment (EA) in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) is a crucial task for the integration of multiple KGs, facilitating the amalgamation of multi-source knowledge and enhancing support for downstream applications. In recent years, unsupervised EA methods have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in leveraging graph structures or utilizing auxiliary information. However, the increasing complexity of many modeling methods limits their applicability to large KGs in real-world scenarios. Given that most EA encoders primarily focus on modeling one-hop neighborhoods within the KG’s graph structure while neglecting similarities among multi-hop neighborhoods, we propose an efficient and effective unsupervised EA method, MPGT-Align, based on a multi-hop pruning graph transformer. The core innovation of MPGT-Align lies in mining multi-hop neighborhood features of entities through two components: Pruning-hop2Token and Attention-based Transformer encoder. The former aggregates only those multi-hop neighborhoods that contribute to alignment targets, inspired by search pruning algorithms. The latter empowers MPGT-Align to adaptively extract more effective alignment information from both entity itself and its multi-hop neighbors. Furthermore, Pruning-hop2Token serves as a non-parametric method that not only reduces model parameters, but also allows MPGT-Align to be trained with small batch sizes, thereby enabling efficient handling of large KGs. Extensive experiments conducted across various benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms most existing supervised and unsupervised EA techniques. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Knowledge Graphs: State-of-the-Art and Applications)

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22 pages, 4268 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Multi-Head Self-Attention-Enhanced Prototype Network with Contrastive–Center Loss for Few-Shot Relation Extraction

by Jiangtao Ma, Jia Cheng, Yonggang Chen, Kunlin Li, Fan Zhang and Zhanlei Shang

Appl. Sci. 2024, 14(1), 103; https://doi.org/10.3390/app14010103 - 21 Dec 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2022

Abstract

Few-shot relation extraction (FSRE) constitutes a critical task in natural language processing (NLP), involving learning relationship characteristics from limited instances to enable the accurate classification of new relations. The existing research primarily concentrates on using prototype networks for FSRE and enhancing their performance by incorporating external knowledge. However, these methods disregard the potential interactions among different prototype networks, and each prototype network can only learn and infer from its limited instances, which may limit the robustness and reliability of the prototype representations. To tackle the concerns outlined above, this paper introduces a novel prototype network called SACT (multi-head self-attention and contrastive-center loss), aimed at obtaining more comprehensive and precise interaction information from other prototype networks to bolster the reliability of the prototype network. Firstly, SACT employs a multi-head self-attention mechanism for capturing interaction information among different prototypes from traditional prototype networks, reducing the noise introduced by unknown categories with a small sample through information aggregation. Furthermore, SACT introduces a new loss function, the contrastive–center loss function, aimed at tightly clustering samples from a similar relationship category in the center of the feature space while dispersing samples from different relationship categories. Through extensive experiments on FSRE datasets, this paper demonstrates the outstanding performance of SACT, providing strong evidence for the effectiveness and practicality of SACT. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Knowledge Graphs: State-of-the-Art and Applications)

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19 pages, 2313 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Completion Model Based on Relation Learning

by Weijun Li, Jianlai Gu, Ang Li, Yuxiao Gao and Xinyong Zhang

Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(17), 9513; https://doi.org/10.3390/app13179513 - 22 Aug 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1990

Abstract

Considering the complexity of entity pair relations and the information contained in the target neighborhood in few-shot knowledge graphs (KG), existing few-shot KG completion methods generally suffer from insufficient relation representation learning capabilities and neglecting the contextual semantics of entities. To tackle the above problems, we propose a Few-shot Relation Learning-based Knowledge Graph Completion model (FRL-KGC). First, a gating mechanism is introduced during the aggregation of higher-order neighborhoods of entities in formation, enriching the central entity representation while reducing the adverse effects of noisy neighbors. Second, during the relation representation learning stage, a more accurate relation representation is learned by using the correlation between entity pairs in the reference set. Finally, an LSTM structure is incorporated into the Transformer learner to enhance its ability to learn the contextual semantics of entities and relations and predict new factual knowledge. We conducted comparative experiments on the publicly available NELL-One and Wiki-One datasets, comparing FRL-KGC with six few-shot knowledge graph completion models and five traditional knowledge graph completion models for five-shot link prediction. The results showed that FRL-KGC outperformed all comparison models in terms of MRR, Hits@10, Hits@5, and Hits@1 metrics. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Knowledge Graphs: State-of-the-Art and Applications)

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20 pages, 2114 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Sparse Subgraph Prediction Based on Adaptive Attention

by Weijun Li, Yuxiao Gao, Ang Li, Xinyong Zhang, Jianlai Gu and Jintong Liu

Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(14), 8166; https://doi.org/10.3390/app13148166 - 13 Jul 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1930

Abstract

Link prediction is a crucial problem in the analysis of graph-structured data, and graph neural networks (GNNs) have proven to be effective in addressing this problem. However, the computational and temporal costs associated with large-scale graphs remain a concern. This study introduces a novel method for link prediction called Sparse Subgraph Prediction Based on Adaptive Attention (SSP-AA). The method generates sparse subgraphs and utilizes Graph SAmple and aggreGatE (GraphSAGE) for prediction, aiming to reduce computation and time costs while providing a foundation for future exploration of large-scale graphs. Certain key issues in GraphSAGE are addressed by integrating an adaptive attention mechanism and a jumping knowledge module into the model. To address the issue of adaptive weight distribution in GraphSAGE, an aggregation function is employed, which is based on the attention mechanism. This modification enables the model to distribute weights adaptively among neighboring nodes, significantly improving its ability to capture node relationships. Furthermore, to tackle the common issue of over-smoothing in GNNs, a jumping knowledge module is integrated, enabling information sharing across different layers and providing the model with the flexibility to select the appropriate representation depth based on the specific situation. By enhancing the quality of node representations, SSP-AA further boosts the performance of GraphSAGE in various prediction tasks involving graph-structured data. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Knowledge Graphs: State-of-the-Art and Applications)

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Review

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21 pages, 6613 KiB

Open AccessReview

Event Knowledge Graph: A Review Based on Scientometric Analysis

by Shishuo Xu, Sirui Liu, Changfeng Jing and Songnian Li

Appl. Sci. 2023, 13(22), 12338; https://doi.org/10.3390/app132212338 - 15 Nov 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2145

Abstract

In the last decade, the event knowledge graph field has received significant attention from both academic and industry communities, leading to the proliferated publication of numerous scientific papers in diverse journals, countries, and disciplines. However, a comprehensive and systematic survey of the recent literature in this area to obtain how the development of event knowledge graph evolves over time is lacking. To address this gap, we performed scientometric analyses utilizing the CiteSpace software of version 6.2.R4 package to extract and analyze data from the Web of Science database, including information about authors, journals, countries, and keywords. We then constructed four networks, including the author co-citation network, journal co-citation network, collaborative country network, and keyword co-occurrence network. Analyzing these networks allowed us to identify core authors, research hotspots, landmark journals, and national collaborations, as well as emerging trends by assessing the central nodes and nodes with strong citation bursts. Our contribution mainly lies in providing a scientometric way to quantitatively capture the research patterns in the last decade in the event knowledge graph field. Our work provides not only a structured view of the state-of-the-art literature but also insights into future trends in the event knowledge graph field, aiding researchers in conducting further research in this area. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Knowledge Graphs: State-of-the-Art and Applications)

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