Welcome to Intentional Arrangement
This is a publication about semantic modeling and the knowledge infrastructures that hold information together — taxonomies, ontologies, controlled vocabularies, knowledge graphs —also known as GOFAI or good old fashioned AI. I often weave in library science concepts and methodologies because, well, I am also a librarian. Outside of the practitioner content, I research and write pieces that elucidate the intersections of society, technology and history.
If you build context-aware systems that organize meaning, or you’re trying to figure out why the ones you’ve inherited don’t work, you’re in the right place.
What you’ll get
Posts arrive weekly. Expect:
Practitioner-level tutorials on building intelligent systems . The Ontology Pipeline™ , from controlled vocabularies to ontologies to knowledge graphs.
Field notes from consulting work — what breaks in enterprise semantic projects and how to fix it.
Essays on where the AI industry is and knowledge infrastructures.
Occasional readings that ground knowledge work and innovations in prior art.
Free subscribers get access to all free content. Paid subscribers get the full archive, working files for tutorials (Turtle, SPARQL, sample graphs), and the comment threads where conversation happens.
Group subscriptions
If your team is doing taxonomy, ontology or knowledge graph work, a group subscription makes sense. Everyone gets the archive, the working files, and a shared reference point for vocabulary that’s otherwise hard to standardize across a team. Group plans are available through Substack’s standard group billing — message me directly if you want to set one up for more than a handful of seats, or if you’d like to combine it with a workshop or office hours.
About me 🤸♂️
I’m Jessica Talisman. I’ve spent more than 25 years as a librarian, information architect, taxonomist, ontologist, and knowledge graph builder, and I run Contextually LLC, where I help organizations build the semantic infrastructure their AI systems need. for reliability and safety. I teach the Ontology Pipeline framework — controlled vocabulary, metadata, taxonomy, thesaurus, ontology, knowledge graphs— as a discipline, and love the craft. In fact, much of my paid subscriber content are early previews of my book, Ontology Pipeline. The book will be available Fall, 2026.
My background in history and library science gives me what I’ve called uncomfortable clarity—I can see exactly where modern AI systems lose track of provenance, context and meaning, and why those losses aren’t going to fix themselves. I have worked at the Department of Justice, Overstock, Pluralsight, Amazon and Adobe. I have also worked as an academic librarian, an archivist and a Gyrotonic teacher.
Why Intentional Arrangement 📚
Libraries have been organizing human knowledge for three thousand years — through stone tablets, scrolls, codices, the printing press, digital systems, the web, and now AI. The techniques have evolved; the discipline hasn’t gone anywhere. What’s kept it durable is intentional arrangement—building systems with the end user in mind, human or machine.
AI has made that discipline visible again, because models built on disorganized data behave exactly the way you’d expect. This publication is an argument for bringing library and information science back into the rooms where infrastructure decisions get made — and a place to learn the methods if you want to do that work yourself.
who this is not for. Counterintuitively, telling people “this isn’t a general AI newsletter, and if you want vendor reviews of LLM tools, you’ll be disappointed” filters in the right audience and makes the right readers feel found.
Join the conversation ⚟
Knowledge emerges from dialogue. Subscribe, read, push back in the comments, send me what you’re working on. The best threads on this publication have come from readers who disagreed with me carefully.
I hope you enjoy Intentional Arrangement, and thank you for being here-! ❤️
Podcasts • Watch and Listen 🎧
Neo4J Event. Context Graphs and Process Knowledge
San Francisco , California
The Data and AI Chief. How Semantic Layers and Ontologies Create Trusted AI
ThoughtSpot Podcast with Cindy Howson
O’Reilly Data Superstream. The Ontology Pipeline™ for AI Systems
O’Reilly
It’s About Data. Knowledge Graphs, Ontologies and Context
It’s About Data with Tony Baer and Matt Housley
