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  • July 6, 2026
  • By Marydee Ojala Editor in Chief, KMWorld, Conference Program Director, Information Today, Inc.
  • ViewPoints

Semantic Layers Bring Answers to Problems KM Is Designed to Solve

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Enterprise Knowledge (EK) co-founders Joe Hilger and Zach Wahl (Joe is COO and Zach is president and CEO) joined up with EK partner and VP of knowledge and data services Lulit Tesfaye to write Bridging Knowledge, Data, and AI: Harnessing the Semantic Layer Framework to Drive Intelligence, a new book published by Springer in May 2026. In addition to all their work at the consultancy and service firm, they have been active participants in the KMWorld and the Data Summit conferences that are organized by Information Today, Inc. How they manage to juggle all their many professional and extracurricular activities is both awe-inspiring and a bit of a mystery.

KMWorld editor-in-chief, Marydee Ojala, was delighted that the three of them took the time to answer a few questions about the book and how semantic layers affect KM practitioners.

First of all, congratulations on publishing Bridging Knowledge, Data, and AI: Harnessing the Semantic Layer Framework to Drive Intelligence. It’s a truly remarkable achievement and must have taken a considerable amount of time, research, and commitment to write. I’m amazed you had the tenacity to see it to completion. What were the main incentives to start the project?

Thank you! It was certainly slow going at times, but we were committed to seeing it through. The driver for the book dates back to late 2023. By that point, we’d already been doing quite a bit of work around semantic layers and their component parts, but Lulit identified the growing trends of organizations seeking a complete semantic layer framework and the critical role it would play in making AI work reliably. At that time, we asked ourselves what role Enterprise Knowledge could and should play in these growing trends That’s when we wrote a great deal of new thought leadership on our website, launched the new Semantic Layer episodes of Knowledge Cast, and created the Semantic Layer Symposium. That was also when we committed to writing the book though it took a while to pick up steam and start making real effort on it.

In your preface, you write: “The combined fields of data management, information management, and knowledge management are at a remarkable point of inflection. .... So what’s different about this time? The answer, put simply, is the semantic layer.” You go on to say they can be harnessed for many uses. Looking at semantic layers through a KM lens, what is the most important thing you’d like practitioners to know about semantic layers?

That’s a great question! Through the specific viewpoint of KM, the simple answer is that semantic layers finally deliver the answer to the problems organizations have wanted KM to solve. The top three ways that we’re seeing this today are expert identification and planning, knowledge gap identification and remediation, and scaled knowledge capture.

For the first, expert identification and planning, a semantic layer framework can join together disparate sources and assets like HR and learning systems, project databases, thought leadership, and client deliverables. Using these sources, it can help to discern who within your organization possesses expertise on particular topics, connecting them for innovation or connecting them with learners for employee development and knowledge transfer. In more advanced use cases, this can be predictive as well, meaning it can be used to identify future gaps in expertise your organization may experience and allow you to act on them before there’s a problem.

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