Welcome to the Workshop on Building a Strategic Supply Chain Knowledge Network.
I want to start by expressing my sincere gratitude to the NIST Team - Serm and Evan for their willingness to host the event and partner with us to shape the program. I am also grateful to the NIST event team -- Sabina, Megan and others for their attention to detail and taking care of all the logistics.
To kick off the workshop, I will give some background on how it came about, and what we are hoping to accomplish.
At the May 2024 National Science Board meeting, three leading scientists were invited to give their view on NSF's AI priorities. Ken Forbus, professor at the Northwestern University, who was one of the three experts, made the point that there are three big revolutions happening in AI today: Deep learning, knowledge graphs and automated reasoning. He argued that there are plenty of resources going into deep learning, and we need to re-balance our AI portfolio and invest in "knowledge graphs for common sense reasoning" and "human-like learning and reasoning methods".
In response to that recommendation, Cogan and I have an NSF grant to explore the feasibility of a new initiative in this space with two specific goals, First, it would serve as a hub for research, training and education on knowledge graphs and automated reasoning. Second, it would host repositories of knowledge based on open-source data.
We have already had two community building workshops in 2025 --- one at AAAI, and another one at Digital Promise. The present workshop is the third community building event. Fourth and final event is happening next week on the topic of Machine Interpretable Rule Systems. Additional information on each of these can be found by navigating through the workshop website.
Let us now talk more about the present workshop on Building a Resilient Supply Chain Knowledge Network.
I will start with the big picture.
Back in 2022, National Science Foundation had convened a design sprint to envision The Open Knowledge Network (OKN), an interconnected network of knowledge graphs, to provide an essential public-data infrastructure for enabling an AI-driven future.
The sprint approached the design process through the lense of a set of use cases driven by the societal needs. Building a strategic supply chain knowledge network was one of those use cases.
Many of the contributors and participants involved in the OKN initiative come from the semantic web background, and are very familiar with the mantra of "a little semantics goes a long way". The kind of perspective that Ken Forbus was arguing at that NSB meeting can be loosely characterized as "big semantics".
For those, who might not have heard the distinction between "little" semantics and "big" semantics, here is quick introduction. The little semantics perspective focuses on capturing/recording the basic facts and not so much the concept meanings. The big semantics perspective advocates capturing more of the meaning of concepts.
We are hoping that the new initiative we are exploring would be a natural evolution of OKN from "little semantics" to also include "big emantics".
Let us now consider the specifics.
We have structured the first day around three specific supply chain use cases: water supply, manufacturing, and transportation.
Manufacturing can be considered as the unifying and overarching use case because manufacturing supply chain is very closely tied to water supply and transportation.
Existing OKN is already pursuing a use case in manufacturing. We will hear more about this work in a little bit, but for now, I want to acknowledge the OKN partnership with NIST on this use case. In particular, NIST has been providing leadership in the Industry Ontology Foundry group which is central to the manufacturing OKN. Partnering with NIST for this workshop makes it an ideal arrangement to explore future evolutions of that work.
The transportation use case, that we are referring to as the "empty mile problem", was chosen based on the report that came out from the OKN sprint.
Our plan for the first day is for us to all get to know each other, and develop a better understanding of the specific problems that need to be solved for each of the three use cases.
We will continue the discussions of the day over the group dinner today evening.
For the second day, tentative plan is to break out into three working session in which we can develop a more detailed plan for each of the three use cases.
Hope this is sufficient to set up the context for the workshop.