What Other Industries Can Learn from Healthcare’s Knowledge Graphs

Healthcare became a leader in knowledge graphs by investing in shared meaning through ontologies, controlled vocabularies, and data exchange standards over centuries. Other industries can learn from this by codifying their own domains, with examples provided from finance (FIBO), law (ELI Ontology), and climate science (CF Conventions). The key lessons include treating controlled vocabularies as shared infrastructure, allowing empirical observation to define data structures, and standardizing data exchange protocols. Ultimately, the piece argues that regulation can be a powerful tool to enforce the semantic alignment necessary for creating durable, interoperable knowledge systems.