The impact of Chinese economic activities is global, leading the US to take action to deter the harmful effects of these actions globally. Increased tensions in Asia with its rapidly expanding military presence make China an increasing risk to the security of the US and its many global partners. With the rise of Strategic Competition, China has increased their commercial activities with state owned enterprises with such companies as Hua Wei and ZTE. As a result there has been increased scrutiny on supply chains associated with critical components in commercial solutions to detect the presence of components that have come in contact with state owned enterprise systems. 

A sometimes overlooked portion of the deeper supply chain vulnerabilities is enhanced due-diligence with a focus on beneficial ownership information. Beneficial ownership information, if enriched properly, can provide key insights into commercial relationships that are potentially of higher risk to federal or commercial acquisition processes. In this use case example Certus Core downloaded the UK central business registry, enriched it with external data, and then re-engineered the data to highlight the relationships in the UK central business registry along with the geolocations of all entities. The purpose of this is to make accessible businesses, company officers, board members, and related parties as well as their relationships to companies and other stakeholders. The resulting knowledge graph is then queryable in natural language to discover their individual ties to countries of interest.

Certus Core has also identified many connections between ownership and sanctions data due to their preliminary sanctions research, leading to insights into how Chinese global assets are situated in the UK business registry. Certus Core continues to push the limits of modern data systems through innovative data solutions such as sKG: defining the future of knowledge graphs and their applications in defense and financial intelligence.

This acceleration to data-driven decision-making allowed Certus Core to identify key individuals' holdings rapidly and generate critical insights for leaders. The value of time to decision is an increasingly important factor for these leaders, making sKG an essential tool in rapidly identifying sanction entities and other illicit financial actors.

Operational Relevance and System Parameters

Certus Core’s Semantic Knowledge Graph (sKG) is a suite of solutions which can be engineered for military use, as well as deliver value into military data structures and query methodologies. The solution is currently used in commercial and government applications. sKG is not a ‘one size fits all’ answer to all of your data problems but a solution which can be applied generally or specifically to data challenges. It is a solution set that serves non-technical users through a natural language query interface which is powered by offline Large Language Models (LLMs); data analyst users through connections to popular analytic tools such as Tableau, Power BI, FNA, or Excel; and data scientist and/or data engineer users through a Jupyter Notebook and our API interface.


sKG is a horizontally and vertically scalable datastore that supports natural language, graph traversal, and keyword search queries in order to enable machine learning and artificial intelligence in operations and supply chain for the military. sKG also uses a scalable ETL pipeline that supports instrumentation and on-the-fly modifications. The underpinning datastore is ScyllaDB, which is an eventually consistent, horizontally scalable database that uses configurable partitioning schemes and b-tree indexes. For graph queries, there is a query engine layer that converts the graph traversals into the requisite database queries. For full-text indexing on a given entity type, sKG can be optionally configured to use OpenSearch. For entities that have a full text index, the query layer will automatically use it where appropriate for improved query performance.

Knowledge Graphs provide a standardized, scalable and extensible method of organizing data while also making the data discoverable using Certus’ sKG platform and by connecting the sKG platform to any front-end user interface for analytics and visualizations through an Application Programming Interface (API). Certus Core will work with the partners to identify the currently used data stores and sources and use this information to begin developing an ontology or set of ontologies. Those ontologies will provide the foundation of the partner's beneficial ownership solution. By leveraging Knowledge Graphs to support enhanced due-diligence and KYC investigations, it facilitates the ability to rapidly query vast amounts of data, provide updated risk information to multiple user interfaces, and can easily be updated to reflect new information, such as new relationships or risk related information.  

A knowledge graph system that supports exploratory data analysis via visualized graph traversals of linked entities across these disparate data sources would enable users to interact with the aforementioned domain’s data sources (and newly identified sources) to accomplish their mission goals. sKG supports both out-of-the-box machine learning models and customized (trained on the data sources) models to provide force-multiplying automation that enables analysts to answer questions more rapidly. 

sKG supports the continued addition of new data sources so that a broader range of questions can be answered. The exploratory data analysis capabilities allows analysts to discover and learn about the available data, entity types, and relationships that they can use to perform queries and analytics. sKG's support of machine learning and data science will enable analysts and data scientists to work together to add push-button automation of otherwise time-consuming analytic processes.



Certus Core’s sKG is licensed software which sits atop data warehouses and data sources, integrates that data, whether on premises or cloud-based (sKG is cloud agnostic) and can be ‘connected’ with currently used applications through APIs. There are no special dependencies or considerations for sKG.  

Certus Core’s sKG software is TRL 8.

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