Ryan Wisnesky

Ryan Wisnesky obtained B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics and computer science from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University, where he studied the design and implementation of provably correct software systems. Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate in the MIT department of mathematics, where he developed the CQL query language based on category theory. He currently leads open-source and commercial development of CQL as CTO of Conexus AI. He maintains an active collaboration with the information-integration department of IBM Research, where he contributed to the Clio, Orchid, and HILprojects.

2021 Talk: How to Optimally Merge Knowledge Graphs with Category Theory

In this talk we describe a new technique for merging knowledge graphs: translating the knowledge graph schemas into categories and the knowledge graph data into functors, then applying the “co-limit/pushout” construction from a branch of mathematics called category theory to merge these categories and functors, and then converting the categories and functors back into knowledge graph schemas and data. We show how this process is mathematically optimal (results in the highest possible data quality in the merge), and describe several real-world use cases of knowledge graph merge that have been implemented in an open-source tool.