Back in March 2026, I interviewed both Jessica Talisman and Heather Hedden for this Curator blogsite. Today I realized that both of these interviews are worth revisiting together because they complement one another nicely. Both speak directly to the steep knowledge modeling and management challenges enterprises face when it comes to agentic AI.

Jessica Talisman describes herself as a semantic engineer and information architect. A diverse background in library science, education and enterprise information architecture Adobe and Amazon Web Services provided her with a big picture view. During the interview, she describes how enterprises so frequently overlook the importance of owning and managing their internal knowledge. 

Heather Hedden, for her part, doesn’t consider herself an architect, although she clearly understands the role of an information architect and others involved in information management. Heather is squarely focused on helping organizations build, maintain and use taxonomies and thesauri that are part and parcel of Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) effectively. 

It’s interesting rereading these interviews back to back. Combined, the interviews offer comprehensive, incisive critiques of where enterprises stand today when it comes to information management and realistic recommendations for essential improvement. 

Jessica: “Data has been collected in abundance. Meaning has not. The result is AI systems that hallucinate, misfire, and cost far more to operate than they should.”

“Enterprises have historically outsourced a great deal of their knowledge work — basic metadata, organization, classification — while investing heavily in data collection and storage. What enterprises have not invested in is transforming that data into meaning and context.”

Heather: “Typically an organization doesn’t have taxonomists. They might have subject matter experts, and a few may have people in knowledge management who know something about taxonomies…”

“The taxonomy governance plan — policies, procedures, ownership, update and maintenance processes — usually doesn’t exist when I arrive at an organization…”

“…subject matter experts are not thinking beyond their area of expertise when it comes to organization. If you ask a subject matter expert to build a hierarchy, they’ll approach it in a certain way that may not reflect how other end users think.”

When taking a look at these interviews together, even if you’ve seen them before, you’ll see how candid and insightful these two pros are about the circumstances enterprises face. 

So please do read through or watch the YouTube videos of the interviews. You’ll see that eventually, organizations will have to own up to the seriousness of the information management problem, given that hands-on knowledge modeling and management of their own data, not to mention that owning the problem and facing it head on, is the only way to competitive AI advantage.

You can find the full interviews, with both video recordings and edited transcripts, via these links: 

Hedden, Heather. “The Accidental Taxonomist on AI Strategy and Automation.” Interview by Alan Morrison. GraphRAG Curator, March 26, 2026. https://graphrag.info/2026/03/26/heather-hedden-the-accidental-taxonomist-on-ai-strategy-and-automation/

Talisman, Jessica. Interview by Alan Morrison. The Curator Podcast. March 9, 2026. https://drive.google.com/open?id=11LJiLyNChKXNZFSshbXF1UKHRy1eNsUqQZWXGYE1nMM