About¶
An interactive intelligent textbook teaching learning knowledge graphs: how to model, build, and use concept-dependency graphs for education.
Audience¶
This book is written for readers with a background like the author's: trained in a technical or scientific discipline, with some programming experience (even if it's years old or rusty), who has since moved into a more specialized field — including legal knowledge management. It's aimed at two overlapping groups:
- Scientists, engineers, and developers — people comfortable with formal, structured thinking and at least some hands-on coding, who want a rigorous but practical introduction to knowledge graphs.
- Legal professionals — lawyers, legal knowledge managers, legal operations staff, and law librarians who are curious about the technology behind concepts like matter graphs, citation networks, expertise location, and conflicts checking, even if they don't write code day-to-day.
You don't need to be an active programmer to get value from this book. Prior exposure to taxonomies, thesauri, or classification schemes — common ground in legal knowledge management and library science — is just as useful a starting point as prior coding experience.
A Note for Less-Technical Readers¶
Not every reader wants to run the code examples, and that's fine — lawyers and other legal professionals in particular may be evaluating or commissioning a knowledge graph project rather than building one by hand. Chapters separate:
- Core concepts — the ideas everyone should walk away with, explained without assuming you can read code.
- Optional: Technical Deep Dive — runnable SPARQL, Cypher, and Python examples for readers who want to build something themselves.
If you'd rather skip the code, read the core concepts in every chapter and skip the technical deep-dive sections — the book is designed so skipping them doesn't break the narrative thread.
How to Use This Book¶
- Read chapters in order — concepts are introduced in dependency order.
- Use the search bar (top right) to jump to a specific term.
- Try the MicroSims as you encounter them; they are the fastest way to build intuition for a new concept.
- Check the Learning Graph when you want to see how a concept fits into the larger picture.
Author¶
Milena Higgins