Though the aims of the project themselves dip into the colonial dream of the great graph of everything, the true harms for both of these projects come what happens with the technologies after they end. Many information conglomerates are poised to pounce on the infrastructures built by the NIH and NSF projects, stepping in to integrate their work or buy the startups that spin off from them.
The NSF's Open Knowledge Network is much more explicitly bound to the national security and economic interests of the US federal government, intended to provide the infrastructure to power an "AI-driven future." That project is at a much earlier stage, but in its early sketches it promises to take the same patterns of knowledge-graphs plus algorithmic platforms and apply them to government, law enforcement, and a broad range of other domains.
This pattern of public graphs for private profits is well underway at existing companies like Google, and I assume the academics and engineers in both of these projects are operating with the best of intentions and perhaps playing a role they are unaware of.
onepict