What is a Knowledge Engineer?
I think I found what I want to be when I grow up (it's already a long list...and I'm already grown up) 😁
I was just watching a video from Neo4j, and the woman that the host was speaking with dropped the term "knowledge engineer". Apparently I haven't been traveling in the right circles because I've never heard that term before.
Here's what ChatGPT 4 had to say about it:
HUMAN: What is a Knowledge Engineer?
CHATGPT: A knowledge engineer is a professional who works in the field of artificial intelligence, focusing on transforming domain expertise into a format that can be understood and used by AI systems. This role involves collaborating with domain experts to extract and codify their knowledge, designing knowledge bases or ontologies, and integrating this knowledge into AI applications...
There was more to that definition that started to get into "emulating human logic and reasoning" and such, but that is not really what resonated with me 😅. The fact that the full definition seemed to start alluding to replacing humans made me less interested in promoting that agenda <nervous laugh>, but fortunately I was already heading in a different direction.
Robot overlords aside, it is more about the concept of the work a knowledge engineer would be doing with regards to codifying software and documentation systems so that they can be understood and accessed by LLM-backed applications.
The broader concept from a software perspective is referred to as creating agents, which give these types of applications the ability to perform all sorts of other programming tasks by mixing standard code writing with natural language. In order of these agents to be useful though, they need to be described with respect to their capabilities along with how they are interacted with.
This is where I like the idea of knowledge engineering coming into play. You need to be able to describe a system, its components, and how they interact with each other in order to be able to automate some of the work it takes maintain and derive value from it.
This is not really a complete thought, but this is more just one of those Today I Learned (TIL) share-outs I wanted to add to this site.
