In this episode of The Shush Free Zone, host Dawn Brushammar talks with Jessica Talisman - librarian, semantic systems expert, and founder of Ontology Pipeline - about what it really takes to build knowledge systems that work for both humans and machines.

Jessica shares her journey from GLAM institutions into the corporate world, where she discovered just how urgently library skills are needed to make sense of messy data, AI hype, and “semantic slop.” Together, Dawn and Jessica unpack ontologies (without the jargon headache), the Ontology Pipeline methodology, and why intentional semantic structure is the key to trustworthy, scalable AI.

From childhood card catalogs to enterprise taxonomies, tag-a-thons, and the hidden power of inference, this conversation is a love letter to librarianship as a technical, strategic, and deeply human discipline, right when the world needs it most.

About Jessica:

As an Information Architect, Jessica applies her extensive experience and education in data architecture, taxonomy, and ontology to build information systems that enhance user experience, support business goals, and enable machine learning. Jessica has a Master of Library and Information Science with a concentration in Informatics and a MicroMasters in Design Thinking.

She has over 25 years of experience in developing and implementing enterprise architecture, e-commerce content structures, knowledge management systems, digital libraries, taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs for various domains and purposes.

Jessica is founder of the Ontology Pipeline, a framework for building semantic knowledge infrastructures and Contextually, which offers collaborative consulting and coaching, focused on helping people master the ways of semantic systems.

Links:

Jessica Talisman | LinkedIn

Ontology Pipeline

Intentional Arrangement | Jessica Talisman | Substack