person · draft
Jessica Talisman
Librarian, taxonomist and ontologist who teaches the Ontology Pipeline, a staged method for building vocabularies, taxonomies, ontologies and knowledge graphs.
503jmt, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
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 sets out the method. The ontology term entry points to it, and Keep it alive takes up her argument that a vocabulary starts to drift once it is deployed.
- affiliation
- Contextually LLC
- role
- ontologist and information architect
- homepage
- https://www.ontologypipeline.com/
- handles
- https://jessicatalisman.substack.com/
makes
Jessica Talisman's 2026 book from Technics Publications, setting out a six-stage method for building a knowledge system from controlled vocabulary to knowledge graph, with a browser Studio and a SKOS editor.
Tags: ontology, taxonomy, knowledge graph, library science