Jesús Barrasa

Over his 20-year career, Jesús Barrasa has spanned the worlds of object-oriented property graphs and assertion-based knowledge graphs.

He knows as much about these two foundational technologies as anyone and offers pragmatic advice to help architects and engineers decide which approach will work best for their needs.

We talked about:

his role at Neo4j in which he helps companies adopt graph technology

his academic study of semantic technology and his early work on mapping relational data to ontologies and enterprise ontologies

his move across the graph spectrum from RDF graphs to property graphs, culminating in his current role at Neo4j

his take on the similarities and differences between RDF and property graph approaches, the key commonality being linked data and the key distinction between them being the level of abstraction that they employ

different ways to approach inference

the origins of the semantic web and how it has made data actionable and interoperable and smarter

how the professional backgrounds of software developers can affect their choice of graph technologies

the crucial role of interoperability in graph technology, and our ongoing inability to productively harness it

how semantics is managed and used in the property graph and RDF worlds

ontology as a technology-independent way of representing knowledge

the importance of staying focused on the needs of practitioners when advising them on how to make a graph technology choice

how knowledge graphs can balance the "opaque power" of large language models with "explicit, declarative, explainable power"

Jesús' bio

Dr. Jesús Barrasa is Neo4j's AI Field CTO and the company's resident expert in Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Technologies. He co-authored the O'Reilly book "Building Knowledge Graphs: A Practitioner's Guide" (released in July 2023) and combines over 20 years of professional experience in the data management space split between industry and research and academia.

Prior to joining Neo4j, Jesús worked for data integration companies like Denodo and Ontology Systems (now EXFO), where he gained first-hand experience with many successful enterprise-wide data integration deployments and large graph technology projects enhancing the operations and analytics of major companies worldwide.

Jesús' doctoral work in Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Representation focused on the automatic repurposing of legacy data as knowledge graphs. He's an active thought leader in the graph and semantics communities and co-hosts the popular monthly webcast on knowledge graphs "Going Meta."

Connect with Jesús online

LinkedIn

Going Meta webcast.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/7WFP_oDQsxI

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 18. If you search for the term "knowledge graph," you're likely to get an equal number of results about property graphs and RDF-based graphs. Jesús Barrasa has been immersed in both of those technologies for more than 20 years. He takes a pragmatic approach to graph technology adoption, focusing on the needs of practitioners and on the ability of knowledge graphs to balance the "opaque power" of large language models with the explainable power of knowledge graphs.

Interview transcript

Larry:

Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 18 of the Knowledge Graph Insights Podcast. I am really delighted to welcome to the show Jesús Barrasa. Jesús is about as graph-ey a person as it gets. I got to say he has a 20-year background in this stuff. He's currently the AI field CTO, Chief Technical Officer for the graph database company Neo4j. Welcome to the show, Jesús. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're doing these days.

Jesús:

Hi Larry. Thank you very much. I'm really, really glad to be here. I mean, we've been trying to plan this for a while now. Really,