The Book Look: Ontology Pipeline, a Framework for Knowledge Engineering
Dataversity, Wednesday, October 21st, 2026
Steve Hoberman reviews Jessica Talisman's book on building vocabularies, taxonomies and ontologies that AI can use.
Data modeling author Steve Hoberman reviews Jessica Talisman's Ontology Pipeline, which shows how library science techniques give structure to modern data architecture.
The book builds in layers: controlled vocabulary, metadata standards, taxonomy, thesaurus, ontology and then knowledge graph.
It starts by finding and reconciling terms scattered across systems, then treats metadata application profiles as semantic infrastructure linking vocabularies, schemas and governance.
Hoberman highlights the argument that many integration problems are really problems of meaning, and that consistent terminology helps AI systems interpret an organization's language correctly.