Abstract:A knowledge graph is a knowledge base that represents objective concepts/entities and their relationships in the form of graph, which is one of the fundamental technologies for intelligent services such as semantic retrieval, intelligent answering, decision support, etc. Currently, the connotation of knowledge graph is not clear enough and the usage/reuse rate of existing knowledge graphs is relatively low due to lack of documentation. This paper clarifies the concept of knowledge graph through differentiating it from related concepts such as ontology in that the ontology is the schema layer and the logical basis of a knowledge graph while the knowledge graph is the instantiation of an ontology. Research results of ontologies can be used as the foundation of knowledge graph research to promote its developments and applications. Existing generic/domain knowledge graphs are briefly documented and analyzed in terms of building, storage, and retrieval methods. Moreover, future research directions are pointed out.