National Science Foundation (NSF) Announces Launch of the Open Knowledge Network, A National Open-Data Platform Connecting More Than 40 Knowledge Graphs

From an NSF Announcement:

Built through the NSF Prototype Open Knowledge Network program and in collaboration with a broad coalition of federal partners, the network is now available for public use

The U.S. National Science Foundation announced today the launch of the NSF Open Knowledge Network (NSF OKN), a national open-data infrastructure that links 43 interconnected knowledge graphs and tens of billions of connected facts across health, the environment, justice, manufacturing, and national security. The network is live and open to the public at okn.us.

NSF OKN provides a structured, persistent, verifiable knowledge layer to complement contemporary artificial intelligence models, providing grounding of facts, attribution, and knowledge governance essential to critical AI applications in a number of fields. OKN’s value goes beyond machines querying structured knowledge: Its deeper value provides AI systems with a shared, explicit, interoperable, and auditable representation of the world on which they are expected to reason and act.

Across science, government, and many key enterprise applications, valuable datasets sit in silos that are not accessible, interoperable, nor ready for use by AI systems. OKN makes federal and public data findable, connected, and machine-readable at a national scale.

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OKN was built by the Prototype Open Knowledge Network program, initially a $26.7 million, 18-research-team effort launched in 2023, with core support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), National Institute of Justice (NIJ), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Each team built a knowledge graph in its own field, then connected it to the other knowledge graphs through a shared technical fabric. The result is a single federated network rather than 18 separate projects.

It proved successful and grew beyond the 18 initial projects. Federal partners invested their own resources to connect their data. NIH provided $2.5 million in supplements to integrate ten of its knowledge graph efforts, and NASA, USGS, and NOAA added data products including a coastal-zone digital twin and NASA’s Earth-observing knowledge graph. Teams that were not part of the original award joined the federation, which now serves 43 graphs. Today the program has drawn active engagement from more than 12 federal agencies and realized over 90 cross-sector partnerships.

The network’s distinctive result is cross-graph querying that answers questions no single database can. For example, linking supply-chain and manufacturing data maps cybersecurity exposure across more than 7,000 semiconductor products from 247 companies, and pairing contamination data with soil-productivity data connects environmental and agricultural questions that were previously separate.

Learn More, Read the Complete Announcement

Direct to okn.us

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