---
id: people/jessica-talisman
about:
  label: Jessica Talisman
  depiction: people/jessica-talisman.jpg
  depiction_credit: '503jmt, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.'
  description: >-
    Librarian, taxonomist and ontologist who teaches the Ontology Pipeline, a
    staged method for building vocabularies, taxonomies, ontologies and
    knowledge graphs.
  tags:
    - ontology
    - taxonomy
    - knowledge graph
    - library science
person:
  affiliation: Contextually LLC
  role: ontologist and information architect
  homepage: 'https://www.ontologypipeline.com/'
  handles:
    - 'https://jessicatalisman.substack.com/'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: 'About, Intentional Arrangement (her newsletter)'
      url: 'https://jessicatalisman.substack.com/about'
    - title: Ontology Pipeline (her consulting site)
      url: 'https://www.ontologypipeline.com/'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Jessica Talisman has worked for more than 25 years as a librarian, information architect, taxonomist, ontologist and builder of knowledge graphs.[^1] She has worked at the US Department of Justice, Overstock, Pluralsight, Amazon and Adobe, and as an academic librarian and an archivist.[^1] She runs Contextually LLC, which helps organisations build the semantic structure their AI systems need, and leads Ontology Pipeline, a consulting business.[^1,2]

She teaches the Ontology Pipeline as a discipline: controlled vocabulary, metadata, taxonomy, thesaurus, ontology and knowledge graph, in that order.[^1] Her newsletter, Intentional Arrangement, covers semantic modelling and the knowledge infrastructures that hold information together, often drawing on library science.[^1]

On the wiki, the review of her book [Ontology Pipeline](/ontologies/the-ontology-pipeline/) sets out the method. The [ontology](/terms/ontology/) term entry points to it, and [Keep it alive](/guides/keep-it-alive/) takes up her argument that a vocabulary starts to drift once it is deployed.