Jessica Talisman

Jessica Talisman is a seasoned information architect with decades of experience across a variety of domains.

She's done a lot of education and outreach around her semantic and and information architecture practices. One of the most important lessons she's learned is the crucial role of standards like the W3C SKOS model to bring structure and semantics to information and knowledge systems.

Since there are never enough information architects in any organization, she supports the democratization of IA practices, but she's also quick to highlight the unique skills that you can only get with deep study.

We talked about:

her work as a senior information architect at Adobe and previously in GLAM (galleries, libraries, art, and museums) and other domains

how her work in GLAM showed her the importance of the concept of lineage and attribution and benefits of the FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) framework

how standards and rules bring discipline and structure to information and data ecosystems

how capturing knowledge via the SKOS standard can provide on its own the structure, semantics, and disambiguation your data needs, as well as set you up for future successes

the importance of focusing on semantic fundamentals and how the ensuing understanding if your data assets can improve activities like a graph RAG implementation

the importance of collaborating and sharing ideas across domains

democratization, evangelism, and other kinds of information architecture outreach

the "Golden Spike" railroad metaphor she uses to illustrate cross-functional collaboration challenges

how linked data can help span organizational silos and align stakeholders on language and terminology

the importance of understanding your unique organizational fingerprint

how applying the library science concept of "scholarly communications" can move organizations forward and promote innovation

Jessica's bio

Jessica Talisman is a Senior Information Architect at Adobe. She has been building information systems to support human and machine information retrieval for more than 25 years. Jessica has worked in a variety of domains such as e-commerce, government, AdTech, EdTech and GLAM. Jessica holds a Masters in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Informatics. She lives in Santa Cruz, California with her partner Dave, and two dogs.

Connect with Jessica online

LinkedIn - Jessica is working on a new book about information architecture and is looking for anecdotes and other input. If you're an IA practitioner with good stories to share, she'd love to connect.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/1tlrZTJ52Vs

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 12. Anyone who has tried to discern how people in a domain talk about the concepts in it, and then try to align stakeholders in an organization around those concepts and the words that describes them, and then share that information with computers so that you can scale the impact of your work, knows that you need a good system to manage your taxonomies and other terminology. Jessica Talisman argues that the W3C SKOS standard is your best friend in such endeavors.

Interview transcript

Larry:

Okay. Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 12 of the Knowledge Graph Insights Podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Jessica Talisman. Jessica's currently a senior information architect at Adobe, but she is extremely experienced in information architecture and knowledge graph stuff, so welcome Jessica, tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.

Jessica:

Thanks, Larry. So I'm currently, as Larry said, a senior information architect at Adobe, and before this, I was information architect over at Amazon. I've worked in many different domain spaces,