Ashleigh Faith

With her 15-year history in the knowledge graph industry and her popular YouTube channel, Ashleigh Faith has informed and inspired a generation of graph practitioners and enthusiasts.

She's an expert on semantic modeling, knowledge graph construction, and AI architectures and talks about those concepts in ways that resonate both with her colleagues and with newcomers to the field.

We talked about:

her popular IsA DataThing YouTube channel

the crucial role of accurately modeling actual facts in semantic practice and AI architectures

her appreciation of the role of knowledge graphs in aligning people in large organizations around concepts and the various words that describe them

the importance of staying focused on the business case for knowledge graph work, which has become both more important with the arrival of LLMs and generative AI

the emergence of more intuitive "talk to your graph" interfaces

some of her checklist items for onboarding aspiring knowledge graph engineers

how to decide whether to use a property graph or a knowledge graph, or both

her hope that more RDF graph vendors will offer a free tier so that people can more easily experiment with them

approaches to AI architecture orchestration

the enduring importance of understanding how information retrieval works

Ashleigh's bio

Ashleigh Faith has her PhD in Advanced Semantics and over 15 years of experience working on graph solutions across the STEM, government, and finance industries. Outside of her day-job, she is the Founder and host of the IsA DataThing YouTube channel and podcast where she tries to demystify the graph space.

Connect with Ashleigh online

LinkedIn

IsA DataThing YouTube channel

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/eMqLydDu6oY

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 24. One way to understand the entity resolution capabilities of knowledge graphs is to picture on old-fashioned telephone operator moving plugs around a switchboard to make the right connections. Early in her career, that's one way that Ashleigh Faith saw the power of knowledge graphs. She has since developed sophisticated approaches to knowledge graph construction, semantic modeling, and AI architectures and shares her deeply informed insights on her popular YouTube channel.

Interview transcript

Larry:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 24 of the Knowledge Graph Insights Podcast. I am super extra delighted today to welcome to the show Ashleigh Faith. Ashleigh is the host of the awesome YouTube channel IsA DataThing, which has thousands of subscribers, thousands of monthly views. I think it's many people's entry point into the knowledge graph world. Welcome, Ashleigh. Great to have you here. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.

Ashleigh:

Thanks, Larry. I've known you for quite some time. I'm really excited to be here today.

What about me? I do a lot of semantic and AI stuff for my day job. But yeah, I think my main passion is also helping others get involved, understand some of the concepts a little bit better for the semantic space and now the neuro-symbolic AI. That's AI and knowledge graphs coming together. That is quite a hot topic right now, so lots and lots of untapped potential in what we can talk about. I do most of that on my channel.

Larry:

Yeah. I will refer people to your channel because we've got only a half-hour today. It's ridiculous.

Ashleigh:

Yeah.

Larry:

We just talked for an hour before we went on the air. It's ridiculous. What I'd really like to focus on today is the first stage in any of this, the first step in any of these knowledge graph implementations or any of this stuff is modeling. I think about it from a designerly perspective. I do a lot of mental model discernment, user research kind of stuff, and then conceptual modeling to agree on things.