Every start of the year I like to reflect on the most memorable events of the previous year (this was 2019). It’s the start of 2021, and I ask myself, what was my most memorable event of 2020. Couldn’t come up with just one, so here are a few:
Honest, no-BS, non-salesy data podcast
Who would have thought that I would start a podcast! With my partner in crime, Tim Gasper, we host Catalog and Cocktails, an honest, no-bs, non-salesy podcast about enterprise data management. We record it live every Wednesday 4pm CT. We use the first 30 minutes of the show to record the podcast episode, and then open up the Zoom call right after for everyone to join in the discussion.
We began this podcast in May 2020, and it’s turned into something greater than we could have ever imagined. Throughout the past 30 episodes we have discussed a wide range of topics: data governance, data quality, data lineage, knowledge graphs, data culture, build vs buy, ROI and much more.
We have had guests to chat on various topics:
– Claire Cahill from The Zebra on the role of the data product manager
– Dean Allemang, Fabien Gandon, and James Handler, authors of the book Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist
– Dwayne Desaulniers from AP on evolving data culture practices
– Jeremy Baksht from Ascential on data marketplace
– Jeff Feng from Airbnb on how they built their internal data catalog
In 2021, our podcast is going to evolve and will have many guests to join the conversation. Listen to it on your favorite podcast app (Apple Podcast, Spotify), like and subscribe!
“Designing and Building Enterprise Knowledge Graphs” Book
Ora Lassila and I submitted a complete first draft of the book “Designing and Building Enterprise Knowledge Graphs” to the publisher on Dec 31!
I’ve been writing this book for a while now (longer than I want to admit). A silver lining of the pandemic is that I was able to focus more time on the book. Additionally, it was an honor that Ora joined me as a co-author. If you are interested in a sneak peak, let me know!
20+ talks
I value the opportunity to share my thoughts and ideas about data management with a wider audience. In 2020 I gave over 20 invited talks!
Back in October 2019, I gave a keynote at the Ontology Matching Workshop: The Socio-Technical Phenomena of Data Integration and Knowledge Graphs:
Data Integration has been an active area of computer science research for over two decades. A modern manifestation is as Knowledge Graphs which integrates not just data but also knowledge at scale. Tasks such as Domain modeling and Schema/Ontology Matching are fundamental in the data integration process. Research focus has been on studying the data integration phenomena from a technical point of view (algorithms and systems) with the ultimate goal of automating this task.
In the process of applying scientific results to real world enterprise data integration scenarios to design and build Knowledge Graphs, we have experienced numerous obstacles. In this talk, I will share insights about these obstacles. I will argue that we need to think outside of a technical box and further study the phenomena of data integration with a human-centric lens: from a socio-technical point of view.
The talk was very well accepted and I received numerous invitations to give it again:
– DSG Seminar at University of Waterloo (Invited by Semih Salihoglu) Video
– Ghent University Data Science Seminar (Invited by Ruben Verborgh)
– University Hasselt (Invited by Frank Neven)
– Invited Lecture CS520 Knowledge Graph at Stanford (Invited by Vinay Chaudhri) Video
– Knowledge Graph Conference
– Tech Innovations Forum at Columbia University
– Guest Lecture at Lehigh University – (Invited by Jeff Heflin)
– Guest Lecture at University of Texas at Austin – (Invited by Ying Ding)
– Guest Lecture at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Invited by Oscar Romero)
– Keynote at 8th Linked Data in Architecture and Construction Workshop (LDAC2020)
– Guest Lecture at University of British Columbia (Invited by Laks Lakshmanan)
– Data Lab Seminar at Northeastern University (Invited by Wolfgang Gatterbauer_
– Distinguished Speaker Series in Data Science and AI at University of Illinois Chicago (Invited by Isabel Cruz)
– Database Lab Research Seminar at UC San Diego (Invited by Arun Kumar) – Video
I started giving talks on the History of Knowledge Graph. I gave a keynote talk at the OSLC Fest (video) and a longer version as a tutorial with Prof Claudio Gutierrez at the Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2020)
At data.world I get to work on how to combine open and enterprise data catalogs. I was invited to give a talk on this topic titled, Open to an Enterprise Data Catalog and Back in the European Data Portal webinar series (video).
I closed the year giving a talk at the Knowledge Connexions Conference with Bryon Jacob title (DataCatalog)<-[poweredBy]->(KnowledgeGraph)
I also gave numerous invited talks to large companies and startups.
Final Thoughts
As expected I did not travel a lot in 2020 (my last trip was March 11). During the first months of 2020, I flew 37,000 miles and visited Canada, Belgium, Netherlands and India (in 2019 I flew 143,000 miles and visited 13 countries). Can’t wait to get back to travel in the second half of 2021 hopefully!