What is a Knowledge Graph? | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• What a knowledge graph is
• What an entity is
• Why it is important to build relationships between entities in a knowledge graph
• How knowledge graphs are structured

What is a Knowledge Graph?

A knowledge graph is a brain-like database, built to intelligently structure data, including different entities and the relationships between them.

Whether you know it or not, you are using knowledge graphs to make decisions every day.

Any Google search experience is based off of their knowledge graph, Amazon Alexa has a knowledge graph to determine how to answer questions, and your own brain is actually structured as a knowledge graph, which helps you to make decisions. In order to understand language, you need to understand that different words and concepts can be related to other words, and that concepts can have different meanings in different situations.

Your business also needs a knowledge graph. You should be able to answer questions like these, internally and externally: What products or services do you offer? Where can I get those products or services? What jobs are available? At which locations are those jobs available? Who is on your leadership team? What departments are they in?

Yext’s knowledge graph is Yext Content, a brain-like database that stores all of your brand’s information as real-world entities and their interrelations.

What is an Entity?

Entity - A real world object within your business’ knowledge graph, such as a job, an event, a location, a professional, an FAQ, or a product

Here is an example of a very basic knowledge graph. As you can see, this not only contains the entities, but also the relationships between the entities.

An example of a knowledge graph we all should be familiar with is that of a school. This isn’t a complete knowledge graph, but should give you a good idea of the types of entities that would be listed for each business, and the relationships between those entities.

As you can see, this school’s knowledge graph contains the location of the schools, the teachers, the students, the classrooms, the sports teams, and more. In addition, you can also see which teachers work in which departments, which fundraising events are run by which sports teams, and which classes are held in which classrooms. Those relationships between entities are critical to being able to answer questions about the school.

A retail business’ knowledge graph would look something like the graph below. It starts to get a little more complicated but the idea is the same. In order for Madave Shoes to answer the questions consumers have about their brand, they need a graph that highlights the entities they have, and the relationships between those entities.

Now Madave Shoes can answer questions like:

• What jobs are available in the New York location?
• When is the launch for the new boots?
• Where can I buy the new sandals?

The ability to structure your data in a way that can answer these questions is critically important for meeting your customers at their moments of intent.