Juan Sequeda

Change agent, Connector, Entrepreneur, Foodie, Idea generator, Inventor, Parent, Scientist, Technologist, World traveler

Juan Sequeda is a Principal Data Strategist at ServiceNow, joining through the acquisition of data.world. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin. Juan’s research and industry work has been on the intersection of data and AI, with the goal to reliably create knowledge from inscrutable data, specifically designing and building Knowledge Graph for enterprise data and metadata management. Juan is the co-author of the book “Designing and Building Enterprise Knowledge Graph” and the co-host of Catalog and Cocktails, an honest, no-bs, non-salesy data podcast. Juan serves as a strategic and innovation bridge across Product/Engineering, Marketing, Sales, and Customer, ensuring technical insights are aligned with business value. Juan has researched and developed technology on semantic data virtualization, graph data modeling, schema mapping and data integration methodologies. He pioneered technology to construct knowledge graphs from relational databases starting in the mid 2000s, resulting in W3C standards, research awards, patents, software and his startup Capsenta acquired by data.world in 2019. Juan is the recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, received 2nd Place in the 2013 Semantic Web Challenge for his work on ConstituteProject.org, Best Student Research Paper at the 2014 International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), the 2015 Best Transfer and Innovation Project awarded by the Institute for Applied Informatics, 2023 Best Industry Paper at SIGMOD and nominated two additional times for best paper at ISWC. Juan strives to build bridges between academia and industry as former co-chair of the LDBC Property Graph Schema Working Group, member of the LDBC Graph Query Languages task force, standards editor at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Juan continues to be an active member of the scientific community by being on the editorial board and program committees of scientific journals and conferences in Semantic Web, Knowledge Graphs, Databases and AI, as well as past organizer of various academic and industry conferences, including being the General Chair of The ACM Web Conference 2023.

I’m passionate about building a Knowledge First world. Today, we live in a Data First world: chasing more and more data without truly understanding what it means, to whom, and in what context. We keep hoping data alone will solve our hardest problems, but doing the same thing over and over without changing our approach is, as Einstein said, the definition of insanity. A Knowledge First world puts people, context, and relationships first. It’s about making meaning explicit and actionable, especially now, as AI Agents becomes more capable. I believe that to make AI truly useful, we must close the knowledge gap: giving agents the context they need to act intelligently, and keeping humans in the loop to guide and govern them. This is not an easy change but it’s the shift we need to unlock real progress.

To truly unlock the power of AI agents, we must invest not just in models, but in the knowledge and context that define how organizations actually work. Without understanding meaning, structure, and intent, AI will act blindly. And to make this work, we need humans in the loop, both to govern this knowledge and to equip them with the knowledge they need to succeed. The future of intelligent systems depends on closing this knowledge gap, with people at the center.

AI, Data, Knowledge Graphs, Ontologies, Podcast, Salsa

Salsa dancing. I grew up in Cali, Colombia which is the salsa capital of the world.