Summary
Still working towards launch. I’ll take a walk down memory lane and quote from the initial Introducing The Graph post in 2018:
In crypto we know that designing the right incentives is critical. We believe that communicating dates produces the wrong incentives. What really matters on a long timescale is 1) priorities and 2) velocity.
Continuing with this same philosophy, we’re going to ship Geo Genesis when we’re confident that it’s ready for viral growth, and we’re continuing to hold on picking a date until we’ve reached that threshold, which we believe is coming up.
A few things that I would highlight:
- StreamingFast had a really great blogpost on Knowledge x AI. I would recommend that everybody read this ultra high quality post to understand how the things we’re doing fits together and what the future of The Graph might look like.
- That was fast followed by a really excellent interview on GRTiQ with Matthieu Di Mercurio discussing this blog post. I highly recommend everyone listen to this podcast as well.
- This Friday’s GRTiQ podcast was with Meher Roy of Chorus One, Indexer at The Graph. In that podcast Meher says “When I look at Yaniv’s recent tweets, he talks about knowledge graphs being something that this network is going to go down that path, and I tend to think that could be something where its product will end up becoming more differentiated. I think one of the things is when you’re indexing blockchain data, when you are taking set of public data and then you’re transforming it into another public data and much of it is logic that is automated and easily replicable, the business model is going to be harder. But when you start to talk something like knowledge graphs, I have a feeling that these knowledge graphs are going to be not so easily replicable and it’s going to lay the foundation for a better business model in the future. Fundamentally, this network has the engineering chops to be able to do interesting things here.”
I think there are many such examples of people across the ecosystem starting to understand the big potential of realigning The Graph behind the idea of the interconnected graph of data as a platform, instead of just infrastructure.
In our case, the main difference between a platform and just infrastructure, is that a platform has an identity. It has its own state. Something is either on The Graph or it isn’t. We want to continue to offer tools to developers so they can build whatever they want, and subgraphs and tools to extract information from blockchains are helpful, but we can do more.
Aligning behind a global interconnected graph of data gives us a few advantages:
- Better interoperability where knowledge can be shared across applications
- The ability to better aggregate knowledge across applications and domains
- The ability to use AI and other tools to ask questions of the entire graph
- The ability to build the Google of blockchain
There are several key understandings that are required to make this pivot:
- The difference between information and knowledge. Tools like subgraphs and substreams allow us to extract information from blockchains. Knowledge requires an actor to link information together to create a higher level of understanding.
- We need to align around Spaces of knowledge being the core unit of the network instead of APIs or data services. APIs and data services are course grained and less reusable. A Space of knowledge that has the consensus of a community behind it, is a reusable general unit that can be written to and consumed from many applications and agents.
- A knowledge graph with a dynamic type system is required for true composability and interoperability between a wide range of rapidly evolving applications.
A nice example of organizing knowledge is looking at how we process and understand News. Every day numerous news events take place that get written about in different articles by different publications. With a knowledge graph, we can organize each News event, link to the relevant articles, extract claims with quotes from each article, and create a historical record of the events. Here’s an example for a recent news event. With more powerful tools for extracting information into knowledge, we can better understand the world around us, and enable ultra powerful applications.
We can’t wait to share this with more and more people. Hopefully we’ll be ready to onboard the rest of the core devs to start organizing initial content soon.
Shout outs
Big thanks to the Pinax team and Semiotic for their help contributing to the Interconnected Graph of Data.