Size: 12″ x 18″; 30.5cm(W) x 45.5cm(H)
Art medium: Coloured pencils on paper
Paper: Fabriano Aquarelle watercolour paper hot pressed
Coloured pencils: Caran d’Ache Luminance, Faber Castell Polychromous and Derwent Lightfast
Artist: Henriette Harmse
Reference: Own imagination
Year: 2023

Artist note: Besides art, I have a deep and passionate interest in everything Semantic Web and Knowledge Graphs, which is part of Artificial Intelligence.

This drawing is how I see research in Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Web Technologies. What bothers me about most depictions of Artificial Intelligence is that it often focusses on the machine and intelligence parts with humans taking backstage if they are not left out completely. For me the crafting of knowledge graphs is a deeply human-driven endeavour. Hence, the reason for having a person very prominently in the drawing. The person is suppose to be gender-, nationality- and race-agnostic to indicate that this could be any person, and in fact it could be you.

The person is holding something that looks like a knowledge graph. Knowledge graphs can enrich our knowledge, but we are driving that discovery process. We are at the very beginning of this discovery process. There is no question that great strides have been made in Semantic Web Technologies, but yet, we are still at beginning of this journey. Hence the reason for a backpack and some sturdy hiking shoes. And the dog? Well who does not want to go on a long journey with their best friend?

The planets in the distance represent the things we currently imagine we can achieve through knowledge graphs. But on this journey into the future there are the things that are just beyond the horizon that we think we see glimmers of, but we really have no idea what these are. The idea of the many hills has been inspired by the Beyond the Horizon song by the Symphony of Science.

The writing under the drawing is the partial definition of SROIQ on which the mathematical semantics of OWL2 is based. These definitions are from the excellent paper titled The Even more Irresistible SROIQ by Ian Horrocks, Oliver Kutz, and Ulrike Sattler. In adding these definitions to the drawing I am celebrating the impact this paper and related Description Logic research had on the Semantic Web.

For me this is a journey that excites and fascinates me and I often feel as if I do not have enough time to explore the many avenues before us.

Not for Sale