OK Google, What Is Your Ontology? Or: Exploring Freebase Classification to Understand Google's Knowledge Graph

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the Freebase data dump to uncover the underlying ontology of Google's Knowledge Graph, revealing how classification principles shape its structure and implications for understanding Google's semantic search.

Contribution

It reconstructs Freebase's ontology from the data dump and analyzes its classification structure in relation to established classification theories, offering insights into Google's knowledge organization.

Findings

Freebase's ontology reflects classification principles from literature.

The structure reveals how Google's Knowledge Graph organizes information.

Insights into the proprietary nature of Google's knowledge organization.

Abstract

This paper reconstructs the Freebase data dumps to understand the underlying ontology behind Google's semantic search feature. The Freebase knowledge base was a major Semantic Web and linked data technology that was acquired by Google in 2010 to support the Google Knowledge Graph, the backend for Google search results that include structured answers to queries instead of a series of links to external resources. After its shutdown in 2016, Freebase is contained in a data dump of 1.9 billion Resource Description Format (RDF) triples. A recomposition of the Freebase ontology will be analyzed in relation to concepts and insights from the literature on classification by Bowker and Star. This paper will explore how the Freebase ontology is shaped by many of the forces that also shape classification systems through a deep dive into the ontology and a small correlational study. These findings will provide a glimpse into the proprietary blackbox Knowledge Graph and what is meant by Google's mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".