Supply Chain Traceability with Knowledge Graphs
How an ontology-governed knowledge graph turns scattered supplier, shipment, and compliance data into a single traceable answer: where did this come from, and can we prove it?
The business problem
When a product recall, an ESG audit, or a customs question hits, the answer usually lives across five systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Reconstructing “where did this component come from, and through whom” becomes a multi-week manual exercise — expensive, slow, and hard to defend to a regulator or a customer.
The value case
A knowledge graph with PROV-O-backed lineage turns that multi-week exercise into a query. Every shipment, supplier relationship, and certification becomes a node with an explicit, queryable chain of custody. The payoff shows up in three places: faster audit response, lower recall scope (you can isolate exactly which batches are affected instead of pulling everything), and a defensible answer when a customer or regulator asks “prove it.”
Where this has legs
This pattern generalizes directly from cloud ingestion and shipment-tracking work already shipped at 30M+ record scale in property-graph form — the shift here is adding the semantic contract (ontology + SHACL) on top, so traceability queries don’t depend on tribal knowledge of the schema.