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- Case Studies
- Clients & Projects
Data-Centric
Services
- Offerings
- Methodology
- Partners
- gist
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Contact Us

Video Library

Semantic Arts (SemArts)

Knowledge Graphs for Federal Agencies Mapping gist to Basic Formal Ontology

Assisting the Technical Workforce with Neuro-symbolic AI

EDT Symposium 2024 - Alessandro Oltramari

Leveraging knowledge graphs to speed clinical decision support, health data interoperability, and artificial intelligence.

EDT Symposium 2024 - Ravi Bajracharya

Data-centric product recommendations at Inter IKEA

EDT Symposium 2024 - Katariina Kari

5- EDTS: Payzer_ Benefits of Semantic Technology The Payzer Case Study

13- EDTS: Marina Aguado_ The Rail Path Towards Data Centricity From Legal Text to Machine Consumable

7- EDTS: Alexander Garcia_ From FAIR to the Mesh Delivering Value through the Digital Continuum

ESTES PARK GROUP:
We will be hosting Jessica Talisman, Senior Information Architect at Adobe this May for Semantic Arts, Inc.'s Estes Park Group, a non-salesy monthly virtual community gathering where guest speakers are invited to share lessons learned from their work developing data-centric architectures.

This session will be co-moderated by Steve Case and Joaquin Melara.

ABOUT THE SESSION:
"Change Management through The Ontology Pipeline"

Organized, structured, and semi-structured semantic knowledge systems are finally being recognized as a core foundation for performant LLM and AI systems. Yet technologists— who are not accustomed to thinking through a holistic socio-technical perspective— often dismiss semantic knowledge systems as overly simplistic and flat, consisting of little more than text labels or annotations.

Business stakeholders may view the investment in developing semantic knowledge graphs as labor-intensive, complex, and a luxury rather than a competitive advantage. This leads organizations to deploy watered-down, off-the-shelf taxonomies or ontologies that only partially meet domain or business needs.

However, a semantic knowledge-graph system is essential for all subsequent AI development— data products, machine-learning algorithms, generative AI/LLM implementations, and more. You can’t build a skyscraper on sand—and you can’t build enterprise AI on top of bad data.

KEY TOPICS:
- The growing recognition of semantic knowledge systems as foundational for high-performance LLM and AI.
- Technologists’ misconceptions—viewing semantic systems as simplistic, label-only artifacts.
- Business stakeholders’ skepticism—seeing knowledge-graph investments as costly, complex, and nonessential.
- The necessity of robust semantic knowledge graphs as the data foundation for all AI initiatives.

LINK TO ARTICLE:
https://moderndata101.substack.com/p/the-ontology-pipeline

ABOUT JESSICA TALISMAN:
Jessica Talisman has dedicated her career to exploring the dynamics of information and knowledge, and how information flows across systems. Her experiences range from historical contexts to educational frameworks and extends to the realms of artificial intelligence and its application within enterprise knowledge systems. She is an active contributor in codifying knowledge management techniques, founded in the discipline of library science. As a librarian, she evangelizes the importance of high-quality data as a prerequisite to rendering truthful and reliable AI systems. Currently, she is a Senior Information Architect at Adobe, building semantic knowledge graphs for content and context setting. She believes in the importance of bridging the gaps between library science and data management, to enable robust knowledge management systems that can support innovation in AI.

Change Management Through The Ontology Pipeline with Jessica Talisman

Working with ontologies is the only way to overlay a common meaning and structure onto your data infrastructure and AI systems. However, when ontologies are modeled, there can be two extreme levels of abstraction that prevent the immediate realization of value and maintainability.

1- DOMAIN-SPECIFIC ONTOLOGIES: In the first case, an ontology is developed around very low-level, concrete domains—say, for example, project management. As such, these ontologies are very precise in defining what projects, tasks, resources, and other pertinent entities/relationships are within the project realm. However, they do not take into consideration a global context of how project management is related to HR, Finance, or Accounting. Therefore, extending these ontologies beyond one or two domains may prove to be cumbersome and confusing without some common terminology between domains.

2- HIGH-LEVEL ONTOLOGIES: The considerations above lead to the use of an upper ontology to mitigate the localized expression of common concepts. However, there are upper ontologies that are so abstract and distant from the data that they are hard to understand and communicate and therefore do not readily act as an effective bridge between domains.

At Semantic Arts, Inc. we have developed an open-source upper ontology called gist that meets the Goldilocks level of abstraction, where you can begin with a common model of the world using easily understood concepts that you can easily extend into localized domains.

Join us (Rebecca Younes, Dylan Abney, and our other ontologies alongside Joaquin Melara & Steve Case) on March 20th in the gist Forum to ask any questions about best practices for working with the upper ontology.

About gist Forum:
We maintain an active gist community where practitioners and users of gist come together to discuss the gist model, implementation best practices, and evolution. Virtual meetings take place the third Thursday of each month.

About gist:
gist represents the fundamental concepts and relationships that exist for most business use cases and is specifically designed to be domain independent. This flexibility allows gist to be applied to a wide spectrum of domains and facilitates both interoperability and integration of knowledge. We have designed gist for clarity and completeness to cover nearly all the concepts that exist in real-world ontology development.

gist is an upper-level ontology containing a minimal set of concepts required for most business applications. It has been developed and maintained by Semantic Arts since 2012. The gist ontology is free to use and is distributed under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. You can use it as you see fit for any purpose, as long as you give us attribution and keep it in the gist namespace.

gist Forum: March 20th 2025

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Semantic Arts, Inc.
123 N College Avenue
Suite 218
Fort Collins, CO 80524

Email:
[email protected]

Phone:
(970) 490-2224

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