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What Microsoft Means When It Calls Something a 'Graph'

There's the current Microsoft Graph, the older Office Graph, the LinkedIn Graph and other graphs.

"Graph" is one of those terms that Microsoft has been throwing around for a few years now, but telling one graph from another has never been straightforward.

More from Build 2018

• Microsoft Touts AI Advances at Build 2018

• Microsoft Kinect Gets New Life Beyond Gaming

• Microsoft Readying Kubernetes on Azure with New Developer Perks

• Microsoft Brings AI to Visual Studio with IntelliCode

• Microsoft Bolsters Teams Developer Tools

• Microsoft Ships Visual Studio 2017 v15.7, Xamarin.Forms 3.0, .NET Core 2.1 RC, More

• Microsoft Gives Overdue Demo of Cortana-Alexa Integration

• Azure Co-Sell Program Hits $2.3 Billion in Partner Revenues

So what exactly does Microsoft mean by it? Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president for Windows at Microsoft, made an effort to break it down Tuesday morning in his Microsoft Build 2018 keynote.

Calling the graph a "key idea," Belfiore stepped back and described it like this for the developer audience at the Seattle show:

"The graph is a cloud-backed data store where both you and us can put organizational data in a way that's private and secure to the organization, but in a way that also lets our solutions take advantage of both. So that AI can reason against that data, that organizational data, and so that the experiences that both we build and you build can light up and make those end users' lives better."

That's not a bad starting point.

Posted by Scott Bekker on May 08, 2018 at 3:09 PM