Opportunities for Knowledge Graphs in the AI landscape — An application-centric perspective
Valentina Presutti, Enrico Motta, Marta Sabou · Journal of Web Semantics · 2025
Artificial Intelligence (AI), as a research field, is experiencing an intensive, dynamic period with major new trends and technologies emerging at an unprecedented pace. Generative AI systems, neuro-symbolic AI, agentic AI, AI regulations are just a few of the ground-breaking, ongoing changes in the field. Against this backdrop, it is natural for each community to embark in a “soul-searching” and strategic positioning activity: What is our role in AI? What are major current and long-term developments? In this introduction to the special issue “Opportunities for Knowledge Graphs in the AI Landscape - An Application-Centric Perspective”, we report on such a soul-searching activity for the knowledge graph community: authors of 17 papers reported on how they used KGs in the context of AI applications/tasks and reflected on the challenges encountered. Collectively, as will be evident from this short introductory piece, the papers reflect a vibrant and varied space of how KGs are used as a key component in the DNA of modern AI systems. They also identify several cross-cutting challenges, that lend themselves for an ambitious research agenda on KGs.