GRC 20: From Value to Knowledge | Yaniv Tal - The Graph

I'm now the CEO of Goo which is a cord Dev at the graph uh I've been working on helping to make web 3 real for seven and a half years so if you haven't accomplished your goals yet don't feel bad we're going to be talking about knowledge today that elusive thing by the way uh did you guys hear about the UFOs like like what's going on I mean there's rumors it could totally be real right like the there could be UFOs I'm trying to figure it out I can't I can't tell where we're at uh I wonder if you have this feeling sometimes right where it's hard to know what's real like how do you know and you know core to this issue is we now have the internet everybody's connected everybody's got opinions and and we might need a hot spot sorry just one second [Music] mag e e the ownership is onchain right and then offchain you have this metadata right the metadata for the application the images name description these kinds of things but that metadata it's a you know fixed structure and so as you have new types of nfts you want to build different types of applications maybe you want to do token gating maybe you want to do IP how do you structure that information and how do you make sure you can support different types of applications we never really like quite got there the way that we build these apps with this Json fixed schema anchored on chain now we have web 3 social right and social is super exciting right it's an obvious use case for web 3 we want to be able to have different applications you want to be able to have composability take your follower graph with you but even these you know social applications that we're using they have these kind of fixed schemas right uh like you define a post but you know which applications are social and which aren't social like almost like any app can really be social right and do we want to be limited to posts you know what if you have jobs what if you have like products um articles research papers all these different types of things so what we need is flex multiple ways of describing information and extending it across applications so last year I published a blog post called knowledge graphs R web 3 raise your hand if you've heard of knowledge graphs okay we got a few people so in this post I describe web 3 and you know web 3 is a new platform for decentralized applications right and you know it's an open verifiable composable web um and so far we we're doing pretty well in in the crypto industry with verifiability and with openness we have these decentralized networks we have in infrastructure protocols right today we have like a ton of infrastructure protocols uh when we founded the graph we were you know one of the very first um but what we don't have is a composability right we still don't have like a universe of interoperable information based applications and to me that's what like web 3 is going to look like right it's uh web 3 it's a new platform with open infrastructure right you don't want vendor lock in um you don't want to have to take platform risk where people own their data right that's what people want to not be like you you know controlled by you you have their their data like locked in applications that are controlled by corporations you want your private data to be private right like actually secure you want public information to be verifiable and uh you want all of that to be interoperable across applications right we need to break free from these data silos so you know I think that that is web 3 now uh on a ium we had this erc20 standard right um and with that one very simple primitive that unlocked dexes that unlocked lending that unlocked this whole flourishing Universe of Defi and defi is amazing um but what we haven't seen is this proliferation of information based apps right outside of finance and so what we need is that type of primitive right it's like an individual Unit A Primitive for composable knowledge to build interoperable knowledge based apps Beyond defi so what is knowledge well data you can think of as like the raw bits right that are maybe like on a blockchain for example and then information is when you decode the data and you put it into a structure right so think think of like tabular information and then knowledge is when you link in label and you create connections between the information to get a higher level of understanding and you can think about how your own brain works when you're learning something when you're creating knowledge you're making connections between things oh this is kind of like that right this contradicts something else that I saw you're making these connections and it's in those free form connections that you turn information into knowledge so GRC 20 is a new Knowledge Graph standard A Primitive for knowledge and it starts with entities and anything can be an entity you can have an entity for a person for a place for an idea right it's all just entities that are interconnected together so you can have a entity for like a city here and importantly you want all of the entities to have globally unique IDs right so if you're referencing the city of San Francisco what id are you using for that right is every app have its own ID and then how how do we know if we're talking about the same things or different things so we need globally unique IDs the atomic unit in knowledge graphs and in gc20 is the triple an entity attribute value this is like the atom of knowledge right The Entity is the entity ID the attribute is the the property of the thing that you're describing so for example a birthday and then the value is the value now interestingly the way that we reference the attributes it's also by ID and so that way you can change the names of things over time and uh you know with Json you can't do that once the data has been created so so this is truly an interoperable thing if you have a little data a little fact that's in this kind of a format any application can interpret this can know exactly what you're talking about and um and that's how we get interoperability by defining the right types of atoms from there uh we we have uh a few native types these are the native types in gc20 and from there you can create higher level types right so you can define a a a type like a place or a person these are higher level types where you define the properties that could exist on those things but it's very flexible right here an entity can have many types and so this gives you a really flexible way of structuring your information and then um you can create relations free form relations between all of your different entities and that's what forms a graph so for example we can say that Byron works at Geo right so this is a relation between the person Byron and the project Geo and what we have here is we Implement a property graph model so with a property graph you can actually add facts to the relation itself and this is not something that you have in relational in in most like database systems that you're familiar with so for example the fact you know what Byron's roles are that he's a software engineer or when he started working those are properties of the relation itself and so putting all of this together we can create a graph right a global graph of all of the world's public knowledge and information that's organized and served in a decentralized way you can build custom applications on top of this the information can be verifiable it can be open it can be composable and uh and we can you know have the tools to start to you know make sense of the world around us um so there's a lot of places that we could start with this because it's very broad you can build any kind of application on top of knowledge graphs so one area that we're starting is with crypto news getting back to that you know news problem so we have a set of editors that have been going through and or organizing you know breaking news in the crypto industry and they tag here are the related projects here are the related people here are the facts and we're trying to create like you know blockchain based record of the facts as they happen um and uh we're going to start like sharing more of this stuff out publicly and you could imagine having like a a global High mind of people that are contributing to that what do you agree with what do you disagree with structuring all of this stuff and so we think this is going to be one interesting area um that you know people that are interested in news uh keep an eye out for and uh we recently announced uh geog Genesis this application that we're using is now open for Early Access so geog Genesis is an app where you can organize knowledge and you can um create communities and you can get communities to consensus on shared facts um you can use this for Dows for protocols for your companies um think of like a notion right like but like a web three notion and where the knowledge is all an interconnected Knowledge Graph so um if you want to play around with geog Genesis you can request your Early Access uh mention that uh you're from eth Denver and we can speed you up on the list and you know we're at this phase of web 3 where we've been building the infrastructure for a while and you know some people are maybe curious like what's this stuff going to be used for right is it just for finance or or what and I believe that when we put all of the right pieces together we're going to rebuild everything on top of this Foundation right we there's no reason to use software where your data is is trapped and controlled by a you know single Corporation and so we are going to rebuild bu everything on top of this solid foundation and you know you all are going to be the people to do this right if you use the right Primitives thank you