Yann Le Franc: From Semantic Silos to Shared Ontology Practice – Episode 54

Yann Le Franc

The emerging field of neurosymbolic AI — combining LLMs and knowledge graphs in hybrid AI architectures — is new to a lot of people.

For Yann Le Franc, it's the story of his career — from his academic days as a computational neuroscientist to his current work creating enterprise systems that ground LLMs in ontology-backed knowledge graphs.

Over his extensive research and consulting career, Yann has honed his ontology design process, which he's now sharing in a platform that guides others in applying those time-tested ontology practices.

We talked about:

his work on the European Open Science Cloud, the LUMEN and GRAPHIA projects, and his KG and AI consultancy

his academic evolution from cellular biology to neuroscience and then to computational neuroscience, neural network research, and neuroinformatics — and how that led to his discovery of the power of ontologies

his current work to connect LLMs and ontologies

a presentation on ontology-backed AI that he delivered at the Cultive Ta Data (Cultivate Your Data) conference earlier this year

the refreshing emergence of the word ontology as a buzzword (as opposed to its "bad word" status only a couple of years ago)

how he applies his research and innovation work to improve enterprise information systems

his work to advance the practices of ontology design and knowledge graph building