The cultural-social nucleus of an open community: A multi-level community knowledge graph and NASA application

The challenges faced by science, engineering, and society are increasingly complex, requiring broad, cross-disciplinary teams to contribute to collective knowledge, cooperation, and sensemaking efforts. However, existing approaches to collaboration and knowledge sharing are largely manual, inadequate to meet the needs of teams that are not closely connected through personal ties or which lack the time to respond to dynamic requests for contextual information sharing. Nonetheless, in the current remote-first, complexity-driven, time-constrained workplace, such teams are both more common and more necessary. For example, the NASA Center for HelioAnalytics (CfHA) is a growing and cross-disciplinary community that is dedicated to aiding the application of emerging data science techniques and technologies, including AI/ML, to increase the speed, rigor, and depth of space physics scientific discovery. The members of that community possess innumerable skills and competencies and are involved in hundreds of projects, including proposals, committees, papers, presentations, conferences, groups, and missions. Traditional structures for information and knowledge representation do not permit the community to search and discover activities that are ongoing across the Center, nor to understand where skills and knowledge exist. The approaches that do exist are burdensome and result in inefficient use of resources, reinvention of solutions, and missed important connections. The challenge faced by the CfHA is a common one across modern groups and one that must be solved if we are to respond to the grand challenges that face our society, such as complex scientific phenomena, global pandemics and climate change. We present a solution to the problem: a community knowledge graph (KG) that aids an organization to better understand the resources (people, capabilities, affiliations, assets, content, data, models) available across its membership base, and thus supports a more cohesive community and more capable teams, enables robust and responsible application of new technologies, and provides the foundation for all members of the community to co-evolve the shared information space. We call this the Community Action and Understanding via Semantic Enrichment (CAUSE) ontology. We demonstrate the efficacy of KGs that can be instantiated from the ontology together with data from a given community (shown here for the CfHA). Finally, we discuss the implications, including the importance of the community KG for open science.