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.