How It Works
Knowledge Graph
A way of storing information as things and the relationships between them — “Ada Lovelace → worked with → Charles Babbage” — rather than as pages of text. Because the connections are written down explicitly, a system can follow them to answer a question, and you can see exactly which link it used. In AI products it is often paired with a language model to keep answers tied to checkable facts instead of the model’s guesswork.
Origin · no single documented coiner
The phrase goes back to academic work in the 1970s and 1980s (Edward Feigenbaum and others used it, and a 1982 University of Twente project used it as its name), but it went mainstream when Google launched its Knowledge Graph on 16 May 2012 with the line “things, not strings.” No single person coined it, and Google’s announcement is the document that fixed today’s meaning.