Exploiting knowledge graphs in industrial products and services: a survey of key aspects, challenges, and future perspectives

Abstract

The rapid development of information and communication technologies has enabled a value co-creation paradigm for developing industrial products and services, where massive heterogeneous data and multidisciplinary knowledge are generated and leveraged. In this context, Knowledge Graph (KG) emerges as a promising tool to elicit, fuse, process, and utilize numerous entities and relationships embedded in products and services, as well as their stakeholders. Nevertheless, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there is scarcely any comprehensive and thorough discussion about making full use of KG's potentials to solve pain points of product development and service innovation in the industry. Aiming to fill this gap, this paper conducted a systematic survey of KG exploitations in industrial products and services and the customizations towards higher adaptability to practices. The authors selected 119 representative papers (up to 10/03/2021) together with other 29 supplementary works to summarize the technical and practical efforts and discuss the current challenges of exploiting KG in industrial products and services. Meantime, this work also highlights enhancing KG's availability and boosting its productivity in industrial products and services development as the core future perspectives to explore. It is hoped that this work can provide a basis for the explorations and implementations of KG-supported industrial product and services development, and attract more open discussions to the exploitation of KG-enabled industrial information systems.