---
title: "WTF is the Context Layer? EP 04 - From Ontology to Context Layer: What Actually Changed With AI? | Atlan"
url: "https://atlan.com/wtf-context-layer/from-ontology-to-context-layer/"
description: "Ontologies have tried to encode business meaning for thirty years. Jessica Talisman, who has been building ontologies since before LLMs existed, joins Austin to give her honest take on whether the context layer is an evolution or a rebrand."
keywords: "context layer, ontology, enterprise AI, knowledge graph, atlan events, context layer series, jessica talisman"
---

> Atlan is hosting Context Conference, bringing together the leaders and builders at the frontier of giving AI the context it needs to understand their business. It runs online on October 28, 2026, from 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM ET. Atlan co-founder Prukalpa Sankar opens and closes the day. Leaders from AstraZeneca, BNY and Verizon share why they invest in context and what they get from it. Registrants get early access to The AI Context Gap, a new study from MIT Technology Review Insights. Register: https://atlan.com/context-conference/

Episode 4 of Atlan's "WTF is the Context Layer?" series: **From ontology to context layer: what actually changed with AI?** Thursday, Jul 30 / 11 AM ET / 45 min / live AMA. The session has happened; the page links to the recording.

Both ontologies and context layers are trying to solve the same problem: give AI an understanding of what business concepts actually mean. Ontologies were the original attempt to encode the meaning human organizations run on. Whether the context layer is a new name for the same job, or whether AI changed something fundamental about how it gets done. Jessica Talisman has been building ontologies since before LLMs existed. She joins Austin to give her honest take.

Recording: [watch EP 04](https://atlan.com/wtf-context-layer/from-ontology-to-context-layer-recording/). Series hub: [WTF is the Context Layer?](https://atlan.com/wtf-context-layer/)

## Questions we'll tackle

- Ontologies have existed for thirty years. Why did its enterprise adoption stall?
- When AI can generate an ontology, what does the human still have to own?
- What can an ontology give an AI agent that a semantic layer cannot?
- Is the context layer a genuine evolution of ontology, or a rebrand?

## Conversation leaders

- **Austin Kronz (host), Director of Data Strategy, Atlan.** Former Gartner Director who spent years advising Fortune 500 data leaders on analytics strategy. He's the person large enterprises call when they can't figure out why their AI keeps getting context wrong.
- **Jessica Talisman (guest), Founder, Contextually LLC; Co-founder, Knowledge Graph Academy; Founder, Ontology Pipeline.** She comes from Information and Library Science, the discipline that organized human knowledge before the data world existed. She has been building ontologies since before most of today's AI stack was invented, and she has a clear point of view on what the AI industry keeps getting wrong about structured knowledge.