Knowledge Graph Re-engineering Along the Ontological Continuum (extended version)

TL;DR

This paper introduces the ontological continuum, a theoretical framework for understanding and transforming knowledge graphs across diverse modelling practices, grounded in empirical observations and formal analysis.

Contribution

It proposes a new conceptual framework, the ontological continuum, to describe, compare, and reengineer knowledge graphs in a principled way.

Findings

The continuum is characterized by semantics vs pragmatics and properties vs affordances.

Formal Concept Analysis is used to formalize the continuum.

A case study on provenance knowledge illustrates the framework.

Abstract

Knowledge graphs have become the primary vehicle for data integration and are critical to the success of modern AI, but the diversity of KG modelling practices, from lightweight vocabularies to richly axiomatised ontologies, makes integration and reuse expensive and brittle. This challenge is particularly acute in neuro-symbolic AI, where bridging neural and symbolic components depends on the ability to reengineer KGs to fit new requirements; GenAI now offers unprecedented automation capability, but without a principled understanding of the KG space, such automation remains conceptually ungrounded. We introduce the ontological continuum as that missing conceptualisation, a theoretical construct a theoretical construct whose characterisation framework is defined by two orthogonal distinctions: semantics vs pragmatics, and properties vs affordances; together these define a vocabulary to describe, compare, navigate, and transform KGs across the full range of modelling practices. The methodological stance is empirical: rather than prescribing how KGs should be modelled, the continuum aims to define a theory of the existent, derived from observation of real-world KG engineering practices and whose structure can be made formally explicit, for example, through Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). We ground the vision through a case study on provenance knowledge, showing how a single concern manifests differently across the continuum. We articulate five open research challenges and invite the community to develop the ontological continuum as a shared research agenda.