We are pleased to invite you to the next installment of the NSF CI Compass webinar series: "The Open Knowledge Network: Connecting Data Across Domains," featuring Chris Bizon, Interim Deputy Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also directs the Analytics and Data Science group.
Please save the date for Tuesday, November 10, at 2 p.m. ET | 1 p.m. CT | Noon MT | 11 a.m. PT.
Abstract:
The Open Knowledge Network (OKN) is an NSF-led effort to make public data easier to find, connect, and use. Over the past 2.5 years, 18 Proto-OKN projects have worked as a single cohort to build and link more than 40 knowledge graphs. The graphs span environment and water, climate, agriculture, health, justice, social services, infrastructure, and manufacturing and supply chains, and bring in data from NSF, NASA, NIH, USGS and NIJ.
This talk will describe the OKN fabric that makes this possible. That includes a common registry and a pipeline for contributing graphs. It also includes a single access point at okn.us, which serves about 26 billion triples through SPARQL and natural-language search. Finally, the talk will cover how the work is shifting toward AI agents, which use MCP tools, reusable skills and a bounded fragment API (KGF) to answer questions that cut across domains.
Bio:
Chris Bizon is Interim Deputy Director of the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also directs the Analytics and Data Science group. His group uses knowledge graphs, machine learning, AI, and semantic reasoning to accelerate scientific discovery. He led the ROBOKOP knowledge graph and question-answering system and is a PI in the NCATS Biomedical Data Translator. He now leads RENCI’s work on the Proto-OKN fabric, which standardizes, connects and serves the Open Knowledge Network’s graphs. Before joining RENCI in 2008, he spent about a decade in industry on fluid dynamics simulation and machine learning for drug discovery. He holds a BS in physics from UNC-Chapel Hill and a PhD in physics from the University of Texas at Austin.
