Ellie Young: Grounding Knowledge Graphs in the Humanities – Episode 4

Ellie Young Ellie Young effortlessly connects the human and technical elements that go into ontologies and knowledge graph building. Ellie came to the world of knowledge graphs with backgrounds in both literature and sustainability. "If the world wasn't on fire," she says, " I would probably be writing novels." That sense of urgency drives her work at Common Action, a platform she is creating to address climate change and advance sustainability. She also applies her knowledge graph expertise in projects like HelioWeb at NASA, which connects scientists in the field of heliophysics. We talked about: her work at Common Action, a platform for climate and for sustainability that uses knowledge graph technology her work at NASA to facilitate collaboration and expose knowledge across the domain of heliophysics (the study of the sun) how personal knowledge graphs can connect individuals and collectives of people how her background in design, art,literature, and the humanities manifests in her knowledge graph work her desire to leverage metadata and capabilities like her language knowledge to facilitate topical discovery the interplay between the efficiencies that AI tech like LLMs offer and the uniquely imaginative variations that human beings create the importance of the practice of design in advancing the productive use of information how user experience design connects to ontologies and back-end tech how she applies, and imagines how others might apply, a literary mindset to ontology practice how she applied ethnographic methods from anthropology to a paper she co-authored on the NASA HelioWeb ontology her ongoing call for volunteers to help with her Common Action program, specifically a current need for creating a "phenomena ontology" Ellie's bio Ellie Young brings knowledge to communities to catalyze successful, local actions to address climate/sustainability problems. She is the founder of Common Action, an innovation network facilitating climate and sustainability action through the development of community and knowledge graph technology. Previously she served as Head of Community and Director of Conference Operations at The Knowledge Graph Conference. Connect with Ellie online LinkedIn ellie at common-action dot org Resources The cultural-social nucleus of an open community: A multi-level community knowledge graph and NASA application, Applied Computing and Geosciences Common Action vision Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/CL9HWocoh7I Podcast intro transcript This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 4. In the domains of ontology engineering and the semantic web, there are plenty of people with advanced technical skills. Practitioners with social-science skills, well-developed literary instincts, and a design mindset are harder to find. Ellie Young smoothly navigates the technical and linguistic worlds that intersect in knowledge graphs, applying her humanities mindset to projects that connect scientists at NASA and address climate change and sustainability. Interview transcript Larry: Okay. Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number four of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am super delighted today to welcome to the show Ellie Young. Ellie is the founder of Common Action, a sustainability and climate change activist organization. She's also ... The way I first met her, she's the former head of community for the Knowledge Graph Conference, and one of the people who really ushered a lot of people into this community. So welcome Ellie. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days. Ellie: Thanks, Larry, and thank you for inviting me to be a special guest with you on this very nice community visit. So yeah. Now I've gone from KGC. I think I left about three years ago to starting Common Action, which is not really an activist organization. It's more like of a design and deep operations platform. And so what we're trying to do is bring technology to the climate problem. Because if we think about it, there's many, many things that make climate challenging to solve. But one of the core components is that it's a coordination challenge. It's a communication challenge. It's a really big project. And so if we think about really big projects, those tend to happen on Gmail or on Slack or maybe on Teams if you're really unlucky and it's a lot of interaction between moving parts, many people, and there's a lot of confusion in that. And it's always dependent on those people knowing each other, especially when you think about project management software like Asana or something like that. Ellie: So in the climate case where we literally cannot know everybody who needs to do something about climate because it's the globe, how would we think about organizing those communications and supporting specific people to identify routes to action pathways that help them become part of this mission set in a productive way? So anybody who wants to do something about climate, where do they go? What do they do? We are trying to be that middle space, both for just equipping people with strategies and also for looking at the unfolding changes globally in the physical layer and anticipating what kind of effects we might have and then supporting people to respond and prepare to those as well. So there's a whole lot of things that we want to facilitate, but at the end of the day, it's a technology-based firm that is bringing to the market complexity-based software, and that is always backed by knowledge graph technology. Larry: Because how else would you ever organize that scope that you just described? That's a really ambitious domain you described. But your current work, you're working in a slightly more constrained domain. At NASA, you're working on the HelioWeb project. That's at least ... What? Science is the boundary of that one? Ellie: Yeah. Well, even better, it's one division of science. So we're just cutting our teeth on a small project for NASA. And what this is called ... And as you said, it's called HelioWeb. What this is about is basically solving some of the same communication and discovery problems for scientists who work both within NASA and beyond NASA within this investigation space of the heliophysics. And so you probably haven't heard of heliophysics. It's not as well socialized as astrophysics, but it is actually another form of astrophysics and it's all about the study of the sun. So there's a lot of people that participate in studying the sun, not only inside NASA, as I mentioned, but also in universities and also abroad in the European Space Agency and other related space agencies. Ellie: As I mentioned, what are our collaboration opportunities? Well, we can work on Slack, we can go to Teams and we can meet in a conference. And so what we're trying to do is expose the knowledge that is latent in a conference space. And we've talked about this too at KGC. So that we can see who is there beyond a simple interaction in the hallway. Because let's say you go to a conference, there's a thousand people there, you can't talk to every one of them. And even if you did, you wouldn't necessarily know everything that would be relevant for them. For them to tell you or for you to share with them. We just don't have the surface area for that in our interactions in person. So what we're doing is supplementing that with a software system that allows individuals who are part of the HelioWeb and heliophysics community to report items of interest about themselves. That could be activities that they're doing, roles that they have, projects that they're organizing, softwares that they built or are maintaining. Any of the contributions that they make to science they can record it in a catalog, and then they can search using an ontology for different kinds of parameters, which are not connected necessarily to an individual name. Ellie: So I may not know who I would like to work with in this group of thousands of scientists because I haven't met them yet, or because I don't know how someone's research interests have transformed or morphed over time. But I know that I'm interested in solar flares or coronal mass eruptions. And so I can search for those topics and see what other people have contributed to the knowledge base on those topics like, like I said, software systems or data sets or papers or whatever you have that people have entered. And then so in that way, discover the actual network. So it's this user interface navigation notebook for supporting the discourse in the field alongside making it accessible to find materials, which is also a challenge in the NASA environment. As you can imagine, they have millions, trillions of data objects. Larry: No kidding. As you're saying that, you're reminding me, have you ever talked to Ashley Faith about personal knowledge graphs? Ellie: A little bit. Larry: Yeah. Because as you're saying that, one of the things ... Because I was talking to her on another podcast years ago about this notion of personal knowledge graphs as a way to just know and understand people, but we were talking about them in the context of enterprise content strategy as a way to know people who know stuff and to get permission to share stuff. But it was all about sharing the kinds of things you just mentioned, like personal interests, things you've done, activities you've done. So the way you described that, you can totally see how you just associate in the ontology, all those interests and activities with the people. Is it as simple as that, or is there more to it? Were there any challenges I guess, in developing the ontology that drives that? Ellie: Yeah. There's multiple stages of HelioWeb, and in the current moment we're in the first stage, which is this catalog.