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Invited talk: "KEy: A Knowledge Engineering Harness" by François Scharffe

Posted July 6, 2026
François Scharffe

KEy: A Knowledge Engineering Harness

Who: François Scharffe, Knowledge Graph Conference founder
When: Wednesday, July 8, 2026, at 3:30 pm
Where: Winslow Building - Conference Room - 1140

Knowledge engineering is a well-established practice involving the processes and techniques used to construct and maintain knowledge graphs. Building knowledge graphs is often resource-intensive, requiring large teams of data engineers, data scientists, ontology modeling specialists, and domain experts working over multiple years.

While the field has matured over the past two decades—with standardized modeling languages, robust ontology practices, and performant triple stores now widely available—the emergence of reliable large language models has created new opportunities for automating knowledge graph construction.

This presentation introduces KEy, a knowledge engineering harness designed to automate knowledge graph construction in enterprise environments. KEy supports new ingestion tasks end to end, from source analysis and ontology alignment to graph population and validation. It also assists with investigating issues, answering questions, and resolving inconsistencies within the graph.

A distinguishing feature of KEy is that it is self-built and self-extending: it analyzes the work it performs, identifies recurring patterns and bottlenecks, and proposes or implements improvements to its own workflows. In doing so, KEy aims to reduce the operational burden of knowledge engineering while making enterprise knowledge graphs faster to build, easier to maintain, and more adaptable over time.

 
Bio: François Scharffe is a hands-on enterprise knowledge architect and semantic AI leader. He builds and stewards production knowledge graphs in financial services, designs ontology, taxonomy, metadata, entity resolution, and data integration capabilities, and connects structured knowledge systems with AI and agentic workflows. His career spans enterprise engineering, data and AI strategy consulting, product leadership, research, and community building. François is a founder of the Knowledge Graph Conference, a leading forum for knowledge-centric AI technologies.