Episode 4
From ontology to context layer:
What actually changed with AI?
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.
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?
SPEAKERS
CONVERSATION LEADERS
HOST
Director of Data Strategy, Atlan
Former Gartner Director who spent years advising Fortune 500 data leaders on analytics strategy — now Director of Data Strategy at Atlan. He's the person large enterprises call when they can't figure out why their AI keeps getting context wrong.
GUEST
Founder, Contextually LLC & Co-founder, Knowledge Graph Academy & Founder, Ontology Pipeline™
Founder of Contextually LLC and co-founder of Knowledge Graph Academy. 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.